the best way to circumvent the attacks of copyright holders... present an ocean of prior art from which most modern works have drawn their inspriation.
What does prior art have to do with copyright? Patents, sure, but copyright?
My favorite part is no one in the US seems to want to actually deal with the consequences of their beleifs. Most claim they want to do something about global warming, until it means I can't fly to Tahiti this summer.
Hmm, I thought I was in America, but according to you, I must be living somewhere else. I wonder why we pay American federal income tax and get to send representatives to the American legislature.
I paid to have solar panels put on my roof. Not only do they generate clean, silent power, they are already about a third of the way done paying for themselves in reduced power bills after just a few years -- and after they've done that, they still have about a decade of expected useful lifetime, making them a profitable investment rather than an extra cost.
I am telecommuting 2-3 days a week to avoid driving in to the office. In fact, I'm typing this from my living room couch. In addition to pumping out less CO2 and saving me money on fuel, telecommuting also gives me a quiet work environment and saves me 45 minutes a day of useless time sitting in my car, leaving me more time to spend with my girlfriend and post to Slashdot. Here too, doing the environmentally friendly thing is also better in other respects. If you consider posting to Slashdot a good thing, anyway.
I've been using compact fluorescents instead of incandescent bulbs for years. More expensive up front, but they last for ages so once again, I save money (and that's just on the bulbs, not even on the power.)
So please take your cynical, incorrect overgeneralizations somewhere else. Or else, please explain how your model of US behavior (remember, you said "no one" here acts on their beliefs, not "many people") squares with the fact that there are several-months-long waiting lists for hybrid cars. Hint: there were waiting lists before the recent jump in fuel prices, too.
Where do you think those exclusionary state laws came from? The magical exclusionary law fairy?
Okay, so you feel one of the four points I posted has no merit. What about the other three?
No proportional representation in the legislature. This is a matter of constitutional law (state constitutions, but still, constitutions that by and large predate modern political parties.) As far as I know this problem also exists in all the state legislatures. A minority of voters cannot change this -- even in states that allow voter-initiated constitutional amendments, those amendments only happen with majority support.
Gerrymandering. The voters have no direct say in how district lines are drawn. A legislature stacked with representatives of a single party (thanks to the lack of proportional representation as enshrined in the state's constitution) gives that party complete control over redistricting. Creative redistricting means any district that looks like it's in danger of flipping to a third party can be reinforced with a few thousand additional party loyalists. And in some cases they don't even have to wait until the next census; see the Texas state legislature.
Winner-take-all electoral college. Again, a matter of state constitutional law. See the first point.
If a huge percentage of voters, say 49%, wants to change the system... tough. They can't do squat about any of those three things. This is their fault how, exactly?
You, and people like you, saying it's "futile" and third party votes are "wasted" are the cause of the two party problem.
I see. So the lack of proportional party representation in the legislature, a century of gerrymandering, winner-take-all electoral college voting, and a bevy of exclusionary state election laws have nothing to do with it.
After all, I'm sure they're only scrutinizing people who are actually doing something wrong. It's the government! We can trust the government to do the right thing and not abuse its power. Unless it's the part of the government that gives money to poor people or sets school standards. That part of the government is run by a bunch of incompetent lunatics. But the part that secretly tabulates data about people, of course they're all good guys.
What kind of bozo modded that Funny? The term "global warming" refers to an increase in the average temperature across the entire planet. It does not mean "every last spot on the globe experiences exactly the same change in temperature at the same time." It is entirely possible -- even likely -- for some places to experience an above-average increase while other places experience a below-average increase or even a decrease. If four places warm by 1 degree and one place cools by 1 degree, the average temperature has increased by.6 degrees.
but if you read their article on overclocking the Intel chip in question, you'll see that the thing draws over half a kilowatt at full load, and around 300W idle. Yikes! You will get a bargain on the machine and pay through the nose on your electricity bills over the subsequent months.
all I really want is a cell phone that works in weak signal areas. I do not want to take pictures, I do not want to listen to MP3s. I do not want to watch videos.
The unspoken assumption here is that there is some sort of mutual exclusion between the two. Do you really think there is a designer somewhere at Nokia or Motorola saying, "Hmm, we could add the 'pick up marginal signals twice as well' module, or we could add a camera. Screw the phone stuff, let's add a camera." Your phone doesn't work well in weak signal areas because it's really hard to make an affordable, compact phone that works well in weak signal areas. Whether or not the phone has a camera has very little to do with it.
As someone who has owned several generations of both phone-only phones and bells-and-whistles smartphones (Treo 650 most recently) I have to say I have noticed absolutely no correlation between the number of extra non-phone features of a device and the quality of the phone part. I have had crappy sound quality and lousy reception from PDA phones and I have had crappy sound quality and lousy reception from non-PDA phones.
It's great to see that everyone here knows what's best for the Chinese people! But I wonder if someone might consider, you know, asking some of them what they think about the situation.
For example, I have a good friend who's a Chinese citizen with US permanent residence (green card). She has lived in the US for years, and in England before that, but her (European) employer has her working in Shanghai at the moment, so she gets to experience China's network policies with the perspective of years of experience with Western unfiltered net access.
Her opinion on all this: "I don't want to use Google to look up political stuff and google.cn is a lot faster from over here." She says for the stuff she actually searches for on a day-to-day basis, she basically never sees the "this list is filtered to comply with local laws" message.
Take that away and you've done what, exactly? Slowed down her Web surfing and not given her a single extra result on her searches. Hooray, you've just reduced the utility of the Internet for millions of innocent people! No evil there!
I think what Google did originally was exactly the best choice from both a business and a moral point of view.
How do you think dictators get to be dictators in the first place?
By fostering a popular uprising after centuries of rule and oppression by successive dynasties of warlords? By handing a solid military defeat to the competing post-dynastic government and forcing them to retreat to a small island province?
Oh, no, right, it was by filtering foreign companies' search engine results. Sorry, my mistake, was reading the wrong history book.
That's a known problem with the power supply, actually -- if you write to iRobot's support department they'll send you a little doohickey that fixes the problem. I had that problem with mine too but it's fine now.
Jeez, the above should not be modded "Troll." A whole lot of people feel the way the poster does. I am not one of them, but even though I vehemently disagree with this point of view, I see that it's one whose popularity makes it very much germane to the discussion. Moderate based on whether something contributes to an interesting discussion, not whether you agree with it.
With that off my chest, I will try to answer the question. You should be concerned about this because once the infrastructure to spy on your calls is in place, and especially if it's kept secret, you have no way of knowing how it's used, and no control over future abuses. Let's say for the sake of argument that today, you're correct and the government is solely listening in on terrorism-related conversations. Fair enough. Now imagine that the next administration, or the one after that, is a bunch of flaming liberals (I am assuming here, perhaps incorrectly, that you'd put yourself somewhere on the right-hand side of the political spectrum). They feel that hate speech is a graver danger to society than terrorism. The next president issues a secret order to the spooks to start compiling lists of people with a history of making threats of violence against others.
Now all of a sudden the government is very interested indeed in your offhand comment, "I could just kill that guy!" You didn't mean it literally, but the speech-recognition systems that today are scanning for "Osama" and "fertilizer truck" don't know that, and your name is added to a list of people who might warrant future scrutiny. You have no way of knowing your name is on the list. All you know is that all of a sudden you're being pulled aside at the airport and given an extra thorough search.
Think that's unlikely? Then leave aside the hypotheticals and consider this: by allowing the government to have this capability, you're making a bet on the good faith of not just the current people in power, but on the good faith of every group that might be in power in your lifetime. If you've looked at any history at all, you know that sooner or later someone who you really don't trust will be in charge of the country. Do you really want them to have an undetectable, consequence-free, oversight-exempt way to decide whether or not they're interested in you? Are you one hundred percent certain that you will never do anything that someone might, even after the fact, find worthy of further scrutiny? I know I'm not.
Person A says, "They didn't respect copyright, and that was SO EVIL!" Person B says, "They introduce laws that protect copyright holders, and that is SO EVIL!" It does not therefore follow that persons A and B both think that everything China does is evil. Can you cite one instance of a single person saying both things?
As an American who has spent time in China and is studying Mandarin daily with the goal of living there for a while, I was perfectly happy with their old pooh-poohing of Western IP concepts, and it's disappointing (not EVIL!, just disappointing) to see them backing down in that area.
And, as one of "you Americans," I have never whined about how bad China is -- economic competition is a net benefit for the world as a whole, which is a good thing even if some people lose out in the short term.
It is already being worked on, and you can download and try it out today (though it's not finished yet). It's called Quercus, from the guys who do the Resin open-source app server. (Which is a fabulous piece of work, I might add.) It compiles PHP to Java bytecode, which can then be JIT-compiled to native code.
Blender is complex. Compare it to, say, SketchUp (which I see was just bought by Google and now has a free-as-in-beer version) and you'll see the UI is much less approachable than it could be.
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
Even without that stuff I'll still want the pirate DVDs because they are so funny -- on a lot of the pirate DVDs you find sold on street corners and in subway stations in Beijing, they have Chinese subtitles with a so-so translation of the English dialogue to Chinese, then they get someone to translate the Chinese back to English to make the English subtitle track. They often literally translate the phonetic approximations of characters' names, so you get subtitles like, "The regime of ancient warrior garden denied these."
Then there are the ones with English subtitles from a completely different movie (one recent action movie has the subtitles from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High").
And the covers are works of art in themselves; they usually include the requisite quotes from reviews, but the pirates don't care whether they use good reviews or not. The review quote for "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" is "Get Shot. Die Boring." Way to sell it!
No, I'm not going to stop bringing back pirate DVDs as souvenirs for my friends even if the legit copies cost less. But I'll grant that the number of Chinese who prefer the pirate DVDs for those reasons is probably pretty small.
She doesn't seem to be doing it just because I like it. Maybe at first, but I have arrived home several times to find her playing "Katamari Damacy" on her own. She is totally hooked on a couple of the WarioWare games for the GBA, to the extent that I can tell when she's about to spend a while in the bathroom because she always hunts around for the GBA first. (Okay, maybe that's too much information, but I take it as a sign there's some hope of turning her into a gaming addict.)
But your warning is definitely worthwhile. I've gone down the "I don't like XYZ, but I'll do it because you like it so much" road before and I agree, it's not a good place to be long-term.
Yes, I expect if you install with just the Chinese locale then it probably works. But in this case the computer was going to be used for English stuff most of the time, with the occasional Chinese E-mail message or web site, so that didn't seem like the right way to go.
Plus I wouldn't have gotten very far setting the thing up with all the necessary apps and such if I'd had to navigate a Chinese-language UI -- my Chinese-language skills are elementary-school level.
After the Asia business tour I realised that we need to improve our
support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and other Asian fonts,
translations, input methods and supporting tools.
Amen to that! I tried installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop, and in the end I just gave up getting Chinese input working properly (she's Taiwanese and sends a lot of mail in Chinese to her friends back home.) After a couple of long nights spent fiddling with it, I could get it to sort of work with some apps, but this is one area where Windows beats Linux hands down -- after I gave up and installed Windows on her machine, enabling Chinese input took me all of about 30 seconds to do, and it works flawlessly in every app she uses.
but "neither the first-sale doctrine, nor the limited-time requirement" are in the US constitution
Huh, funny, Article 1, Section 8 of my copy of the Constitution says Congress has the power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Guess my copy is defective. Where'd you get yours?
A terrifying vision of the future
on
Inescapable Data
·
· Score: 1
What links everything together context-wise are XML files and protocols.
I voted for Bush for various reasons, but I would probably stand alongside you if a recall vote were held today.
Perhaps you won't mind answering a question, then. I ask this as someone who didn't like either of the major-party candidates in the last election, and I've been wondering this as I've seen Bush's approval ratings drop.
The question is: do you believe that the Bush administration has gotten worse since the election? What made you change your opinion of him enough to want him out of office now? I guess that's two questions.
To me, it seems like the administration's behavior has been pretty consistent from the get-go, and I am truly puzzled about what people perceive as being any different now than in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005. I look at the news and just see more of the same, but clearly a lot of other people are looking at the news and coming to a different conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
What does prior art have to do with copyright? Patents, sure, but copyright?
Hmm, I thought I was in America, but according to you, I must be living somewhere else. I wonder why we pay American federal income tax and get to send representatives to the American legislature.
I paid to have solar panels put on my roof. Not only do they generate clean, silent power, they are already about a third of the way done paying for themselves in reduced power bills after just a few years -- and after they've done that, they still have about a decade of expected useful lifetime, making them a profitable investment rather than an extra cost.
I am telecommuting 2-3 days a week to avoid driving in to the office. In fact, I'm typing this from my living room couch. In addition to pumping out less CO2 and saving me money on fuel, telecommuting also gives me a quiet work environment and saves me 45 minutes a day of useless time sitting in my car, leaving me more time to spend with my girlfriend and post to Slashdot. Here too, doing the environmentally friendly thing is also better in other respects. If you consider posting to Slashdot a good thing, anyway.
I've been using compact fluorescents instead of incandescent bulbs for years. More expensive up front, but they last for ages so once again, I save money (and that's just on the bulbs, not even on the power.)
Until California removed my ability to choose my electric utility, I was paying my monthly power bill to a renewables-based energy company. It was partially the loss of that choice that motivated me to invest in the solar panels.
So please take your cynical, incorrect overgeneralizations somewhere else. Or else, please explain how your model of US behavior (remember, you said "no one" here acts on their beliefs, not "many people") squares with the fact that there are several-months-long waiting lists for hybrid cars. Hint: there were waiting lists before the recent jump in fuel prices, too.
If a huge percentage of voters, say 49%, wants to change the system... tough. They can't do squat about any of those three things. This is their fault how, exactly?
I see. So the lack of proportional party representation in the legislature, a century of gerrymandering, winner-take-all electoral college voting, and a bevy of exclusionary state election laws have nothing to do with it.
After all, I'm sure they're only scrutinizing people who are actually doing something wrong. It's the government! We can trust the government to do the right thing and not abuse its power. Unless it's the part of the government that gives money to poor people or sets school standards. That part of the government is run by a bunch of incompetent lunatics. But the part that secretly tabulates data about people, of course they're all good guys.
What kind of bozo modded that Funny? The term "global warming" refers to an increase in the average temperature across the entire planet. It does not mean "every last spot on the globe experiences exactly the same change in temperature at the same time." It is entirely possible -- even likely -- for some places to experience an above-average increase while other places experience a below-average increase or even a decrease. If four places warm by 1 degree and one place cools by 1 degree, the average temperature has increased by .6 degrees.
but if you read their article on overclocking the Intel chip in question, you'll see that the thing draws over half a kilowatt at full load, and around 300W idle. Yikes! You will get a bargain on the machine and pay through the nose on your electricity bills over the subsequent months.
The unspoken assumption here is that there is some sort of mutual exclusion between the two. Do you really think there is a designer somewhere at Nokia or Motorola saying, "Hmm, we could add the 'pick up marginal signals twice as well' module, or we could add a camera. Screw the phone stuff, let's add a camera." Your phone doesn't work well in weak signal areas because it's really hard to make an affordable, compact phone that works well in weak signal areas. Whether or not the phone has a camera has very little to do with it.
As someone who has owned several generations of both phone-only phones and bells-and-whistles smartphones (Treo 650 most recently) I have to say I have noticed absolutely no correlation between the number of extra non-phone features of a device and the quality of the phone part. I have had crappy sound quality and lousy reception from PDA phones and I have had crappy sound quality and lousy reception from non-PDA phones.
For example, I have a good friend who's a Chinese citizen with US permanent residence (green card). She has lived in the US for years, and in England before that, but her (European) employer has her working in Shanghai at the moment, so she gets to experience China's network policies with the perspective of years of experience with Western unfiltered net access.
Her opinion on all this: "I don't want to use Google to look up political stuff and google.cn is a lot faster from over here." She says for the stuff she actually searches for on a day-to-day basis, she basically never sees the "this list is filtered to comply with local laws" message.
Take that away and you've done what, exactly? Slowed down her Web surfing and not given her a single extra result on her searches. Hooray, you've just reduced the utility of the Internet for millions of innocent people! No evil there!
I think what Google did originally was exactly the best choice from both a business and a moral point of view.
You mean like this? (Which is not the same thing as this.)
By fostering a popular uprising after centuries of rule and oppression by successive dynasties of warlords? By handing a solid military defeat to the competing post-dynastic government and forcing them to retreat to a small island province?
Oh, no, right, it was by filtering foreign companies' search engine results. Sorry, my mistake, was reading the wrong history book.
That's a known problem with the power supply, actually -- if you write to iRobot's support department they'll send you a little doohickey that fixes the problem. I had that problem with mine too but it's fine now.
With that off my chest, I will try to answer the question. You should be concerned about this because once the infrastructure to spy on your calls is in place, and especially if it's kept secret, you have no way of knowing how it's used, and no control over future abuses. Let's say for the sake of argument that today, you're correct and the government is solely listening in on terrorism-related conversations. Fair enough. Now imagine that the next administration, or the one after that, is a bunch of flaming liberals (I am assuming here, perhaps incorrectly, that you'd put yourself somewhere on the right-hand side of the political spectrum). They feel that hate speech is a graver danger to society than terrorism. The next president issues a secret order to the spooks to start compiling lists of people with a history of making threats of violence against others.
Now all of a sudden the government is very interested indeed in your offhand comment, "I could just kill that guy!" You didn't mean it literally, but the speech-recognition systems that today are scanning for "Osama" and "fertilizer truck" don't know that, and your name is added to a list of people who might warrant future scrutiny. You have no way of knowing your name is on the list. All you know is that all of a sudden you're being pulled aside at the airport and given an extra thorough search.
Think that's unlikely? Then leave aside the hypotheticals and consider this: by allowing the government to have this capability, you're making a bet on the good faith of not just the current people in power, but on the good faith of every group that might be in power in your lifetime. If you've looked at any history at all, you know that sooner or later someone who you really don't trust will be in charge of the country. Do you really want them to have an undetectable, consequence-free, oversight-exempt way to decide whether or not they're interested in you? Are you one hundred percent certain that you will never do anything that someone might, even after the fact, find worthy of further scrutiny? I know I'm not.
As an American who has spent time in China and is studying Mandarin daily with the goal of living there for a while, I was perfectly happy with their old pooh-poohing of Western IP concepts, and it's disappointing (not EVIL!, just disappointing) to see them backing down in that area.
And, as one of "you Americans," I have never whined about how bad China is -- economic competition is a net benefit for the world as a whole, which is a good thing even if some people lose out in the short term.
It is already being worked on, and you can download and try it out today (though it's not finished yet). It's called Quercus, from the guys who do the Resin open-source app server. (Which is a fabulous piece of work, I might add.) It compiles PHP to Java bytecode, which can then be JIT-compiled to native code.
Blender is complex. Compare it to, say, SketchUp (which I see was just bought by Google and now has a free-as-in-beer version) and you'll see the UI is much less approachable than it could be.
Remember, if it stops just one terrorist, it's all worth it!
Even without that stuff I'll still want the pirate DVDs because they are so funny -- on a lot of the pirate DVDs you find sold on street corners and in subway stations in Beijing, they have Chinese subtitles with a so-so translation of the English dialogue to Chinese, then they get someone to translate the Chinese back to English to make the English subtitle track. They often literally translate the phonetic approximations of characters' names, so you get subtitles like, "The regime of ancient warrior garden denied these."
Then there are the ones with English subtitles from a completely different movie (one recent action movie has the subtitles from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High").
And the covers are works of art in themselves; they usually include the requisite quotes from reviews, but the pirates don't care whether they use good reviews or not. The review quote for "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" is "Get Shot. Die Boring." Way to sell it!
No, I'm not going to stop bringing back pirate DVDs as souvenirs for my friends even if the legit copies cost less. But I'll grant that the number of Chinese who prefer the pirate DVDs for those reasons is probably pretty small.
But your warning is definitely worthwhile. I've gone down the "I don't like XYZ, but I'll do it because you like it so much" road before and I agree, it's not a good place to be long-term.
Plus I wouldn't have gotten very far setting the thing up with all the necessary apps and such if I'd had to navigate a Chinese-language UI -- my Chinese-language skills are elementary-school level.
Amen to that! I tried installing Ubuntu on my girlfriend's laptop, and in the end I just gave up getting Chinese input working properly (she's Taiwanese and sends a lot of mail in Chinese to her friends back home.) After a couple of long nights spent fiddling with it, I could get it to sort of work with some apps, but this is one area where Windows beats Linux hands down -- after I gave up and installed Windows on her machine, enabling Chinese input took me all of about 30 seconds to do, and it works flawlessly in every app she uses.
Guess my copy is defective. Where'd you get yours?
We are so doomed.
Perhaps you won't mind answering a question, then. I ask this as someone who didn't like either of the major-party candidates in the last election, and I've been wondering this as I've seen Bush's approval ratings drop.
The question is: do you believe that the Bush administration has gotten worse since the election? What made you change your opinion of him enough to want him out of office now? I guess that's two questions.
To me, it seems like the administration's behavior has been pretty consistent from the get-go, and I am truly puzzled about what people perceive as being any different now than in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005. I look at the news and just see more of the same, but clearly a lot of other people are looking at the news and coming to a different conclusion.
(Which is why it's called an intelligence quotient.)