Odd, because it seems to claim that it is. Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
To paraphrase for you: "This Constitution... shall be the supreme Law of the Land;". Certainly seems to be a code of laws to me.
Your paraphrase is unfair, or disingenuous, whichever. "This Constitution [and some other laws [US Code] and treaties] shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't say 'or' some other laws and treaties.
Either way, Berne and Geneva treaties since the 70s have affected our copyright law, and as the section you quote mentions, are to be respected --in addition to the Constitution-- as the law of the land.
Nothing personal. I agree that the acts passed to comply with these treaties (extended terms of life or more, copyright by default) have damaged the public domain in a way that is at odds with the desire to 'promote Science and the Useful Arts."
These schemes (almost) never work, that's probably why you didn't hear about it. I mean the most people ever really get for all their clamoring is maybe one extra season or, like with Farscape, an extra couple hours.
I agree with the sentiment... but I guess file formats is what you would consider a 'loophole'. The MSIE remedy includes opening of APIs and protocols for interop, but makes no mention of file formats. We'll have to wait for the MS Office lawsuit for that...
(as a sibling points out)
D. Starting at the earlier of the release of Service Pack 1 for Windows XP or 12 months after the submission of this Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall disclose to ISVs, IHVs, IAPs, ICPs, and OEMs, for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, via the Microsoft Developer Network ("MSDN") or similar mechanisms, the APIs and related Documentation that are used by Microsoft Middleware to interoperate with a Windows Operating System Product. In the case of a new major version of Microsoft Middleware, the disclosures required by this Section III.D shall occur no later than the last major beta test release of that Microsoft Middleware. In the case of a new version of a Windows Operating System Product, the obligations imposed by this Section III.D shall occur in a Timely Manner.
E. Starting nine months after the submission of this proposed Final Judgment to the Court, Microsoft shall make available for use by third parties, for the sole purpose of interoperating with a Windows Operating System Product, on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (consistent with Section III.I), any Communications Protocol that is, on or after the date this Final Judgment is submitted to the Court, (i) implemented in a Windows Operating System Product installed on a client computer, and (ii) used to interoperate natively (i.e., without the addition of software code to the client operating system product) with a Microsoft server operating system product.
Duh, we're talking about iPhoto. Of course, iPhoto is out and it is trivial to add rich explicit metadata with a couple clicks using the keywords panel.
An easy half step is using 'keywords' in iPhoto. When you show the keyword box a set of descriptors (like the cull search in Garageband) will be listed on the left. I set keywords for things like "cats" or "landscapes" or "family" and first and last names and whatnot. Then, for example, when you do an import you select all the thumbnails that show landscapes and put a mark in the keyword box for landscapes. Anyhow, if you know about all this then you can see how cool building up keywords can be. You can build smart-albums for things like keywords "sky, landscape" or "family, vacation, beach, David, Rolfe" etc. Anyway -- the point I'm going for, is all this metadata can be entered in less than a minute with no typing once you have a set of expressive keywords defined. I like captions and comments as much as the next guy, but that is a lot of typing:-D
The distinction about Mail2 and HTML is this: You can now compose email as html -- meaning you can type in messages using tags like table, img, a, code, etc. Mail1 would let you copy and paste in rich text, and turn it into html when it sent it to someone else, but you couldn't compose the mail as html. To clarify a little more, if you pasted a bunch of html into a new message it would just send that code with all the tags escaped and such... like on Slashdot the difference between "HTML Formatted" and "Extrans" and "Plain Old Text". I can think it's really only that useful to people who want to make glossy pretty html emails like ADC sends you. Of course the new Safari's "mail this web page" feature could easily be used to get this functionality. Eh. Sorry for rambling.
I'm having to guess s/he's calling it "crippled" because it's not region free. That's what first popped into my head when I read that comment. I don't know what else s/he could be referring too.
Shouldn't the Windows Media Player handle DVDs? I don't keep up on that kinda thing.
Are you sure Kim was Chinese? He sure looks Chinese, but I don't remember them saying for sure. He doesn't look Korean, for sure.
This has really irked me about some of the later Treks... why do they have their character profiles so etched in stone that they can't accomodate their actors...
Harry Kim -- an obviously Korean surname, played by an actor of obviously Chinese descent... Would all those scripts have been different if they just changed his character's name to Harry Chang? Or crap, how about not even using an anglo name like Harry...
Hoshi, too -- what they couldn't find a Japanese actor? Well then why on Earth didn't they change the character name when they went with a Korean actress? Too weird to have a Korean lingual prodigy? I guess Hye-Jun would be too far of a strech for the clueless Enterprise writing team. Oh oh, or they could have looked up a Korean reading of the same kanji, like Seong, or spelled the same name in a compatible romanization like Heo-si. Caveat: I liked Enterprise, but was disappointed with many episodes. Sigh.
Anyway, at least George Takei was of Japanese descent.:-D It just seems sometimes like they do it to be 'politically correct', to make some 'quota' and just count on audiences to be too ignorant to notice./rant:-)
unfortunateson: you can't build it on US or European soil: it needs to be at the equator.
Anonymous: Or at a pole. Just have to put a swivel at the base.
Shimmer: Interesting idea. I've never heard that suggested before. I wonder how practical this is [...]
How is this at all possible knowing that \tau_net = I*\alpha = dL/dt (Newton's second law for rotation and then angular form)?
I think there's a reason you've never heard this suggested before -- because it's fundementally wrong. Angular momentum is a big factor in keeping the ribbon and counterweight aloft. You can't have orbit while just sitting above a pole (there's no force preventing you from flying straight down (up?) into the Earth). Anyhow, you need a force of some kind to counteract the force of mg.
Correct me if I'm wrong... Space Elevators, as I understand them, use ballast to provide tension (ballast can be either more cable stretching past the target elevation, or some localized mass at the 'end', space station, asteroid, etc.). The tension against the ballast comes from orbit, because there is no ballast to sufficiently counteract Earth's gravity without it (unless we had a ribbon long enough to reach some equilibrium point between us and the Sun affixed to the Earth in some way (on a track?) such that it always pointed directly at the Sun -- then we'd need crazy contraptions to sync with the moving base to load and unload it).
That's just some Physics 1 thinking, I'm by no means an expert. However, I see a lot of people on this thread talking about SE without even basic understandings of phsics (maybe that's me?:-D). I think Jerf said it best: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145575 &cid=12191065
Life plus seventy... however, there are pretty good odds that within that 70 year span some lobby will get a boneheaded congress to extend the term again.:-D
(You can count on a copyright extension every time Mickey Mouse is about to reach the public domain.):-\ Sigh. 'For limited times' means exactly infinity minus one.
Turning away visitors with offensive/pervasive ads... is what really shoots one's self in the foot.
I am really amazed with all these adblock, flashblock, pop-up block... Will it not cause the advertisers and other comapanies lose money and lead to another dotcom collapse. [sic]
No. The dotcom collapse had nothing to do with advertising and everything to do with over speculation. If you combined any noun with 'e-business' or 'online' VCs would just start throwing money at you. Most of these businesses didn't pan out and when the market got wise (at last) the bubble deflated.
A few years ago there was a pretty big depression in online ad rates -- that put a crunch on a few sites. As a result there was some consolidation, some sites went away, and most sites started running tip jars.
Finally, if sites are serious about surviving on advertising, and they know that pop-ups or singing Flash ads will drive away their visitors, then it is in the sites' best interest for two things to happen:
1) Apply pressure to their advertisers to stick with banners and such that don't drive away visitors, and
2) trust that their loyal visitors will employ pop-up and flash-blocking so that they can continue to patronize their site and don't harm the page-views and other traffic metrics that amuse in advertisers in the first place.
Asking an unknowable question as a rhetorical device could be considered as speculation. If the question was not rhetorical, I guess you 'win'. (If the question was rhetorical, then it's an assertion of the unknowable, i.e., conjecture, speculation.:-) I'm not trying to be a pedant or move this discussion to semantics.)
I don't have any answers to that question (although I am curious as to why people saw fit to create copyright in the first place, if it didn't increase the kind, quantity, or quality of art available - that might help answer the question).
The history of copyright is pretty well preserved.:-) You can read all about it; Iirc Lessig's free Free Culture covers this history in the first couple chapters. In the American tradition it (and the patent) was provided for [in the Constitution] to advance science and the arts by providing monopoly incentive.
(Not to insure the advance of science and the arts, but to promote it. This is to head off others' arguments about the fundemental creative genius of humanity. Humans were creative before monopoly incentive.)
you: Art would not cease to exist. Whether or not you would get the same kind, quantity, or quality of art is a whole other question.
It's not a question at all, just like how many CDs the RIAA could or couldn't sell with or without Internet copyright infringement. That argument is totally fallacious.
Exactly, the GP assumes (wrongly) that in your world without copyright that there are also no contracts!
Why would an author give his manuscript to a publisher without assurances?! That's right, she wouldn't. When an author comes to a publisher in the world without copyright they come to an agreement before the material changes hands. The publisher has more of a problem than the creator. The creator has a monopoly on her ideas until she distributes them. The publisher, by his very nature, is giving up his monopoly the moment he sells a copy. He needs to be able to run his business in such a way (as you described) where the novelty of the product and the quality of the product make profit. If the publisher makes profit, he is successful and will continue on, if he doesn't, he will fail and his business will be culled. Once his business folds, it's no problem, another publisher can duplicate the work if they are able to be profitable.
Interestingly, 'passing off an author's work as your own' is already against our moral code, it's called plagerism and our society doesn't accept it. When the GP suggests that a publisher will just take (not purchase?!) the words of an author and sell them as their own they are committing a social transgression -- if not State crime.
John: You could use the guts of an optical mouse for that.
No you couldn't.
Google "optical flow" and compare that to what this CMU research is about (digital object/pattern matching as applied to Monte Carlo localization).
These two techniques are WORLDS apart. Optical flow might not even be good enough to accurately measure location of a vehicle traveling in a straight line unless the surface contains no similarly aligned repeating elements or was specially patterned to allow for flow measurements across its whole range of velocities (maybe the refresh rate of the optical sensor could be controlled via microprocessor to account for this). I'm sure there are good papers on the web that will explain the pros and cons better than I have.
An example of this problem is when you move a an optical mouse at just the right speed over a surface with a very regular pattern/texture (or absolutely no pattern/texture). This is why the [optical] Logitech Trackman Marble has the funny random dot pattern. Newer [better] optical mice avoid some of this by using bright LEDs to provide better and variable contrast on the surface texture. Sorry I started rambling.
In short optical flow would be no better than other forms of dead-reckoning. Depending on the speed of the vehicle and the characteristics of the floor and the rate of the sensor it could be worse (e.g., when you're on the highway and the spin of a wheel looks like it's going backwards).
Because your first link is to http//www.newscientist.com/home.ns which is malformed (see, there's no colon after the protocol), you must be using a Mozilla derivative that is set to use Google with "I'm feeling lucky" as the handler for 'keywords'. Go to about:config, filter for 'keyword' and set keyword.enabled to false if you won't want unexpected results from mistakes.
Anyhow, funny that you would post about it rather than just fix your typo.:-D
Ah, at last, there's the demarcation. Everyone who reads Wired but doesn't watch Drew Carey is prone to using the word meme to describe cultural ideas...:-D Otherwise persons must use the less effecient expression "cultural idea".
I also subscribe to Science News... which incedentally sometimes beats Slashdot to the punch on some science stories. I know it's weird that a print mag would have a story sooner than the web, but it happens.
Further, I think the writing is great. To parrot the parent a little. It's more accessible (i.e., they define terms, provide simple explication). You don't have to be as geeky as this crowd to still get the full effect of each piece, so your kids might get something out of it too. I'm no materials engineer, but found the long-form article on advances in cement interesting and informative (for example: translucent cement?!).
I don't want to get in a price argument (I don't love it because it's cheap), so I'm going with value. I'd say for the value it wins out over Nature, or SciAm, maybe even Smithsonian. If you don't have the ~$300 a year it would take you to subscribe to all four (just about anyone can get the 'pro' rate for Nature at $130/yr) and could only get just one, I would encourage Science News. If nothing else, it's a good overview of the weeks interesting stuff, and since they cite the other journals you can head off to the library if you need more info than they provide.
App specific menu at top of window == toolbar
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 1
Maybe the answer is to simply support both, and have app-specific menus appear and disappear when you activate a "show menu" window decoration, or tap the alt key or something, and just remember the setting. I hate to say "make it a preference", as it's a copout for design, but this really does seem to demand one.
These app-specific menus that you describe at the top of application windows... these are called "toolbars" and many, many applications have had them for ages. Incidentally, they aren't modal and exactly address your concerns. Toolbars are also user customizable (super easy to build with x-code of course).
You obviously have not seen one of these ads. I got an ad for The Interpreter last night (apparently the only ad TiVo's got right now) during "24" - there were no ads for this movie during the ads I was ff'ing through (that I could see, anyway).
Omg, and THIS got modded informative? The original poster was correct. I too have a Tivo; I too watched 24 Monday night. And the billboard only popped up OVER the video for the movie being advertised. In fact, I was so suprised I rewound it and checked again. Interestingly, the ad only comes up during the fast forwards over that segment of video (the same way the 'thumbs up message' comes on only during ads for certain shows. (Remember 'thumbs up'?...that intrusive content specific feature that's been on the service since 2001.)
Uh, no. The ad appears for the entire duration you are fast-forwarding.
Uh, no. You are entirely wrong. Wrong. If you didn't delete 24 go back and look if you can't take the heat. It doesn't use a "commercial detect", it obviously uses an on-band signal in the commercial itself. I don't know what's up with your Tivo but 'thumbs up' has never worked incorrectly (i.e., never appeared for the wrong program, never displayed for more than the commercial it was attached to).
What interested me the most, is that during a 3-arrow fast forward (what is that 8x? 16x? I know 1-arrow is 2x), anyway 3-arrow fast-foward the billboard for the movie with it's opening date appeared on the screen for 1 second in the middle of the video of the ad it was over lapping. I can't imagine how this could be any more offensive than those ads that just have text or still images for their entire 30 seconds. The same effect is achieved -- you get some idea of the product being advertised as it flashes by FOR ONE OR TWO SECONDS. This is the best they can hope for I guess.
In short, these ads totally destroy one of the main reasons for using TiVo, and when you see one, you'll feel the same.
I totally don't feel the same. I think the implementation is great. It's very well thought out. The image is only displayed over the duration of the ad and only when fast-forwarding. The image doesn't obscure the entire video so you can verify this yourself. Every other function is not affected (replay, slow-mo, paused frame advance, rewind, 30-second jump, 15-minute jump, etc. do not trigger the billboard).
You are totally fudding and got modded up. Unreal. Just like all the other Tivo naysayers. "Tivo is horrible, I'm gonna throw mine out, blah blah." Fine, build a Myth box or get an eyeTV, but you won't go back to watching 'real' TV. I'd rather not watch television than watch it without Tivo.
(disclaimer, I bought a series one Phillips Tivo in 2001 and a series two at the beginning of last year, so that should reveal my bias. I've spent more on Mt. Dew than I have on my Tivo subscription.)
I urged parents to become more vigilant consumers of media--and I also urged them if they were concerned about the constant exposure to violence or irresponsible sexual activity that there was nothing standing in their way of coming together as parental groups and in effect producing a consumer's boycott against media which offended their values and sensibilities. And particular, I hear it all the time, many parents feel that way about video games, which were just coming into use in a rather large way and influencing how their children both spent their time and what they thought about. I also appealed to movie, music, and video game producers and broadcasters to come together and develop one uniform ratings system -- one that gave parents clear unequivocal information about the media products they and their children were consuming.
Looks like you and the senator are making the same point. "Let's have our parents teach us the morals they believe [...]". I don't think that proposing ratings systems is really getting into anyone's personal life. It's really more like helping parents (remember, we're all for the parents) make more informed decisions. I can tell from your other comments though [on this thread anyway] that you are more interested in ranting against all the bad, power-mongering politicians than really adressing the core issue: media saturation and its effect on the young. I'm not even saying that's bad, so nothing personal there. I'm just saying that the quote you pulled for 'Clinton slams GTA' isn't really representative of the argument you are making, i.e. that Clinton is pro-interference-in-your-game-purchases on moral grounds. Sheesh. She never even uses the words moral or immoral in the whole damn speech. She's not dictating any ethics, merely positing that killing hookers is a negative image. Would you even disagree? Should kids be encouraged to partake in the virtual slayings of sex-workers? Or narcotics trafficing? Or jail breaks? Or any number of other (again, would you disagree) anti-social behavior?
Anyhow, in all seriousness, I don't see what the big deal is unless this is all just some left over Clinton bashing that we all haven't got out of our systems in TEN YEARS.
Oh, and to the topic of GTA, until you complete all the Pimping missions in GTA:SA, it really is better to kill the prostitute after your health returns, to get the money back. Once you've mastered the pimping though, you make money on every visit from a whore. At that point you may as well get a ho after every stop at the Burger Shot, to get back some cash you spent on fast food. Yay unlimited consumption, yay unchecked murder, yay trivialized sex roles, yay indescriminate parody of pop-culture! I'm no prude and would consider this innappropriate for any one under (the arbitrary age of Mature ratings) 18. That should reveal some of my bias. I am not a parent.
(Oh and sorry, as usual, I got to rambling and didn't really make any particular point.)
Slashdot Mirror
To nitpick you a little bit:
... shall be the supreme Law of the Land;". Certainly seems to be a code of laws to me.
Odd, because it seems to claim that it is.
Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
To paraphrase for you: "This Constitution
Your paraphrase is unfair, or disingenuous, whichever. "This Constitution [and some other laws [US Code] and treaties] shall be the supreme Law of the Land." It doesn't say 'or' some other laws and treaties.
Either way, Berne and Geneva treaties since the 70s have affected our copyright law, and as the section you quote mentions, are to be respected --in addition to the Constitution-- as the law of the land.
Nothing personal. I agree that the acts passed to comply with these treaties (extended terms of life or more, copyright by default) have damaged the public domain in a way that is at odds with the desire to 'promote Science and the Useful Arts."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=save+odyssey+ 5
These schemes (almost) never work, that's probably why you didn't hear about it. I mean the most people ever really get for all their clamoring is maybe one extra season or, like with Farscape, an extra couple hours.
(as a sibling points out)
Duh, we're talking about iPhoto. Of course, iPhoto is out and it is trivial to add rich explicit metadata with a couple clicks using the keywords panel.
An easy half step is using 'keywords' in iPhoto. When you show the keyword box a set of descriptors (like the cull search in Garageband) will be listed on the left. I set keywords for things like "cats" or "landscapes" or "family" and first and last names and whatnot. Then, for example, when you do an import you select all the thumbnails that show landscapes and put a mark in the keyword box for landscapes. Anyhow, if you know about all this then you can see how cool building up keywords can be. You can build smart-albums for things like keywords "sky, landscape" or "family, vacation, beach, David, Rolfe" etc. Anyway -- the point I'm going for, is all this metadata can be entered in less than a minute with no typing once you have a set of expressive keywords defined. I like captions and comments as much as the next guy, but that is a lot of typing :-D
The distinction about Mail2 and HTML is this: You can now compose email as html -- meaning you can type in messages using tags like table, img, a, code, etc. Mail1 would let you copy and paste in rich text, and turn it into html when it sent it to someone else, but you couldn't compose the mail as html. To clarify a little more, if you pasted a bunch of html into a new message it would just send that code with all the tags escaped and such... like on Slashdot the difference between "HTML Formatted" and "Extrans" and "Plain Old Text". I can think it's really only that useful to people who want to make glossy pretty html emails like ADC sends you. Of course the new Safari's "mail this web page" feature could easily be used to get this functionality. Eh. Sorry for rambling.
I'm having to guess s/he's calling it "crippled" because it's not region free. That's what first popped into my head when I read that comment. I don't know what else s/he could be referring too.
Shouldn't the Windows Media Player handle DVDs? I don't keep up on that kinda thing.
Are you sure Kim was Chinese? He sure looks Chinese, but I don't remember them saying for sure. He doesn't look Korean, for sure.
:-D It just seems sometimes like they do it to be 'politically correct', to make some 'quota' and just count on audiences to be too ignorant to notice. /rant :-)
This has really irked me about some of the later Treks... why do they have their character profiles so etched in stone that they can't accomodate their actors...
Harry Kim -- an obviously Korean surname, played by an actor of obviously Chinese descent... Would all those scripts have been different if they just changed his character's name to Harry Chang? Or crap, how about not even using an anglo name like Harry...
Hoshi, too -- what they couldn't find a Japanese actor? Well then why on Earth didn't they change the character name when they went with a Korean actress? Too weird to have a Korean lingual prodigy? I guess Hye-Jun would be too far of a strech for the clueless Enterprise writing team. Oh oh, or they could have looked up a Korean reading of the same kanji, like Seong, or spelled the same name in a compatible romanization like Heo-si. Caveat: I liked Enterprise, but was disappointed with many episodes. Sigh.
Anyway, at least George Takei was of Japanese descent.
FWIW, Didn't G.W. go to Yale? (Who didn't?!)
I'm sure Google could tell me. God, I'm so lazy.
To be more clear, I was not implying that your response, in particular, was pedantic.
I love these threads because it's always so amusing to see what mistakes are made in the pedantic responses.
"...although parentheses or dashes would have been made it clearer..."
Would have been made it clearer, indeed.
unfortunateson: you can't build it on US or European soil: it needs to be at the equator.
:-D). I think Jerf said it best: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145575 &cid=12191065
Anonymous: Or at a pole. Just have to put a swivel at the base.
Shimmer: Interesting idea. I've never heard that suggested before. I wonder how practical this is [...]
How is this at all possible knowing that \tau_net = I*\alpha = dL/dt (Newton's second law for rotation and then angular form)?
I think there's a reason you've never heard this suggested before -- because it's fundementally wrong. Angular momentum is a big factor in keeping the ribbon and counterweight aloft. You can't have orbit while just sitting above a pole (there's no force preventing you from flying straight down (up?) into the Earth). Anyhow, you need a force of some kind to counteract the force of mg.
Correct me if I'm wrong... Space Elevators, as I understand them, use ballast to provide tension (ballast can be either more cable stretching past the target elevation, or some localized mass at the 'end', space station, asteroid, etc.). The tension against the ballast comes from orbit, because there is no ballast to sufficiently counteract Earth's gravity without it (unless we had a ribbon long enough to reach some equilibrium point between us and the Sun affixed to the Earth in some way (on a track?) such that it always pointed directly at the Sun -- then we'd need crazy contraptions to sync with the moving base to load and unload it).
That's just some Physics 1 thinking, I'm by no means an expert. However, I see a lot of people on this thread talking about SE without even basic understandings of phsics (maybe that's me?
Life plus seventy... however, there are pretty good odds that within that 70 year span some lobby will get a boneheaded congress to extend the term again. :-D
:-\ Sigh. 'For limited times' means exactly infinity minus one.
(You can count on a copyright extension every time Mickey Mouse is about to reach the public domain.)
Turning away visitors with offensive/pervasive ads... is what really shoots one's self in the foot.
I am really amazed with all these adblock, flashblock, pop-up block... Will it not cause the advertisers and other comapanies lose money and lead to another dotcom collapse. [sic]
No. The dotcom collapse had nothing to do with advertising and everything to do with over speculation. If you combined any noun with 'e-business' or 'online' VCs would just start throwing money at you. Most of these businesses didn't pan out and when the market got wise (at last) the bubble deflated.
A few years ago there was a pretty big depression in online ad rates -- that put a crunch on a few sites. As a result there was some consolidation, some sites went away, and most sites started running tip jars.
Finally, if sites are serious about surviving on advertising, and they know that pop-ups or singing Flash ads will drive away their visitors, then it is in the sites' best interest for two things to happen:
1) Apply pressure to their advertisers to stick with banners and such that don't drive away visitors, and
2) trust that their loyal visitors will employ pop-up and flash-blocking so that they can continue to patronize their site and don't harm the page-views and other traffic metrics that amuse in advertisers in the first place.
Asking an unknowable question as a rhetorical device could be considered as speculation. If the question was not rhetorical, I guess you 'win'. (If the question was rhetorical, then it's an assertion of the unknowable, i.e., conjecture, speculation. :-) I'm not trying to be a pedant or move this discussion to semantics.)
:-) You can read all about it; Iirc Lessig's free Free Culture covers this history in the first couple chapters. In the American tradition it (and the patent) was provided for [in the Constitution] to advance science and the arts by providing monopoly incentive.
I don't have any answers to that question (although I am curious as to why people saw fit to create copyright in the first place, if it didn't increase the kind, quantity, or quality of art available - that might help answer the question).
The history of copyright is pretty well preserved.
(Not to insure the advance of science and the arts, but to promote it. This is to head off others' arguments about the fundemental creative genius of humanity. Humans were creative before monopoly incentive.)
you: Art would not cease to exist. Whether or not you would get the same kind, quantity, or quality of art is a whole other question.
It's not a question at all, just like how many CDs the RIAA could or couldn't sell with or without Internet copyright infringement. That argument is totally fallacious.
Speculation is not evidence.
Exactly, the GP assumes (wrongly) that in your world without copyright that there are also no contracts!
Why would an author give his manuscript to a publisher without assurances?! That's right, she wouldn't. When an author comes to a publisher in the world without copyright they come to an agreement before the material changes hands. The publisher has more of a problem than the creator. The creator has a monopoly on her ideas until she distributes them. The publisher, by his very nature, is giving up his monopoly the moment he sells a copy. He needs to be able to run his business in such a way (as you described) where the novelty of the product and the quality of the product make profit. If the publisher makes profit, he is successful and will continue on, if he doesn't, he will fail and his business will be culled. Once his business folds, it's no problem, another publisher can duplicate the work if they are able to be profitable.
Interestingly, 'passing off an author's work as your own' is already against our moral code, it's called plagerism and our society doesn't accept it. When the GP suggests that a publisher will just take (not purchase?!) the words of an author and sell them as their own they are committing a social transgression -- if not State crime.
John: You could use the guts of an optical mouse for that.
No you couldn't.
Google "optical flow" and compare that to what this CMU research is about (digital object/pattern matching as applied to Monte Carlo localization).
These two techniques are WORLDS apart. Optical flow might not even be good enough to accurately measure location of a vehicle traveling in a straight line unless the surface contains no similarly aligned repeating elements or was specially patterned to allow for flow measurements across its whole range of velocities (maybe the refresh rate of the optical sensor could be controlled via microprocessor to account for this). I'm sure there are good papers on the web that will explain the pros and cons better than I have.
An example of this problem is when you move a an optical mouse at just the right speed over a surface with a very regular pattern/texture (or absolutely no pattern/texture). This is why the [optical] Logitech Trackman Marble has the funny random dot pattern. Newer [better] optical mice avoid some of this by using bright LEDs to provide better and variable contrast on the surface texture. Sorry I started rambling.
In short optical flow would be no better than other forms of dead-reckoning. Depending on the speed of the vehicle and the characteristics of the floor and the rate of the sensor it could be worse (e.g., when you're on the highway and the spin of a wheel looks like it's going backwards).
Because your first link is to http//www.newscientist.com/home.ns which is malformed (see, there's no colon after the protocol), you must be using a Mozilla derivative that is set to use Google with "I'm feeling lucky" as the handler for 'keywords'. Go to about:config, filter for 'keyword' and set keyword.enabled to false if you won't want unexpected results from mistakes.
:-D
Anyhow, funny that you would post about it rather than just fix your typo.
Ah, at last, there's the demarcation. Everyone who reads Wired but doesn't watch Drew Carey is prone to using the word meme to describe cultural ideas... :-D Otherwise persons must use the less effecient expression "cultural idea".
What about using the word "transactions" when deal would have done? Where will the elitism end?? ;)
I also subscribe to Science News ... which incedentally sometimes beats Slashdot to the punch on some science stories. I know it's weird that a print mag would have a story sooner than the web, but it happens.
Further, I think the writing is great. To parrot the parent a little. It's more accessible (i.e., they define terms, provide simple explication). You don't have to be as geeky as this crowd to still get the full effect of each piece, so your kids might get something out of it too. I'm no materials engineer, but found the long-form article on advances in cement interesting and informative (for example: translucent cement?!).
I don't want to get in a price argument (I don't love it because it's cheap), so I'm going with value. I'd say for the value it wins out over Nature, or SciAm, maybe even Smithsonian. If you don't have the ~$300 a year it would take you to subscribe to all four (just about anyone can get the 'pro' rate for Nature at $130/yr) and could only get just one, I would encourage Science News. If nothing else, it's a good overview of the weeks interesting stuff, and since they cite the other journals you can head off to the library if you need more info than they provide.
Maybe the answer is to simply support both, and have app-specific menus appear and disappear when you activate a "show menu" window decoration, or tap the alt key or something, and just remember the setting. I hate to say "make it a preference", as it's a copout for design, but this really does seem to demand one.
These app-specific menus that you describe at the top of application windows... these are called "toolbars" and many, many applications have had them for ages. Incidentally, they aren't modal and exactly address your concerns. Toolbars are also user customizable (super easy to build with x-code of course).
You obviously have not seen one of these ads. I got an ad for The Interpreter last night (apparently the only ad TiVo's got right now) during "24" - there were no ads for this movie during the ads I was ff'ing through (that I could see, anyway).
...that intrusive content specific feature that's been on the service since 2001.)
Omg, and THIS got modded informative? The original poster was correct. I too have a Tivo; I too watched 24 Monday night. And the billboard only popped up OVER the video for the movie being advertised. In fact, I was so suprised I rewound it and checked again. Interestingly, the ad only comes up during the fast forwards over that segment of video (the same way the 'thumbs up message' comes on only during ads for certain shows. (Remember 'thumbs up'?
Uh, no. The ad appears for the entire duration you are fast-forwarding.
Uh, no. You are entirely wrong. Wrong. If you didn't delete 24 go back and look if you can't take the heat. It doesn't use a "commercial detect", it obviously uses an on-band signal in the commercial itself. I don't know what's up with your Tivo but 'thumbs up' has never worked incorrectly (i.e., never appeared for the wrong program, never displayed for more than the commercial it was attached to).
What interested me the most, is that during a 3-arrow fast forward (what is that 8x? 16x? I know 1-arrow is 2x), anyway 3-arrow fast-foward the billboard for the movie with it's opening date appeared on the screen for 1 second in the middle of the video of the ad it was over lapping. I can't imagine how this could be any more offensive than those ads that just have text or still images for their entire 30 seconds. The same effect is achieved -- you get some idea of the product being advertised as it flashes by FOR ONE OR TWO SECONDS. This is the best they can hope for I guess.
In short, these ads totally destroy one of the main reasons for using TiVo, and when you see one, you'll feel the same.
I totally don't feel the same. I think the implementation is great. It's very well thought out. The image is only displayed over the duration of the ad and only when fast-forwarding. The image doesn't obscure the entire video so you can verify this yourself. Every other function is not affected (replay, slow-mo, paused frame advance, rewind, 30-second jump, 15-minute jump, etc. do not trigger the billboard).
You are totally fudding and got modded up. Unreal. Just like all the other Tivo naysayers. "Tivo is horrible, I'm gonna throw mine out, blah blah." Fine, build a Myth box or get an eyeTV, but you won't go back to watching 'real' TV. I'd rather not watch television than watch it without Tivo.
(disclaimer, I bought a series one Phillips Tivo in 2001 and a series two at the beginning of last year, so that should reveal my bias. I've spent more on Mt. Dew than I have on my Tivo subscription.)
Looks like you and the senator are making the same point. "Let's have our parents teach us the morals they believe [...]". I don't think that proposing ratings systems is really getting into anyone's personal life. It's really more like helping parents (remember, we're all for the parents) make more informed decisions. I can tell from your other comments though [on this thread anyway] that you are more interested in ranting against all the bad, power-mongering politicians than really adressing the core issue: media saturation and its effect on the young. I'm not even saying that's bad, so nothing personal there. I'm just saying that the quote you pulled for 'Clinton slams GTA' isn't really representative of the argument you are making, i.e. that Clinton is pro-interference-in-your-game-purchases on moral grounds. Sheesh. She never even uses the words moral or immoral in the whole damn speech. She's not dictating any ethics, merely positing that killing hookers is a negative image. Would you even disagree? Should kids be encouraged to partake in the virtual slayings of sex-workers? Or narcotics trafficing? Or jail breaks? Or any number of other (again, would you disagree) anti-social behavior?
Anyhow, in all seriousness, I don't see what the big deal is unless this is all just some left over Clinton bashing that we all haven't got out of our systems in TEN YEARS.
Oh, and to the topic of GTA, until you complete all the Pimping missions in GTA:SA, it really is better to kill the prostitute after your health returns, to get the money back. Once you've mastered the pimping though, you make money on every visit from a whore. At that point you may as well get a ho after every stop at the Burger Shot, to get back some cash you spent on fast food. Yay unlimited consumption, yay unchecked murder, yay trivialized sex roles, yay indescriminate parody of pop-culture! I'm no prude and would consider this innappropriate for any one under (the arbitrary age of Mature ratings) 18. That should reveal some of my bias. I am not a parent.
(Oh and sorry, as usual, I got to rambling and didn't really make any particular point.)