Nothing, as near as I can tell, has been "carefully worked out" by the courts or the Patent Office. The PAtent office is a patent granting machine because it has become a profit center for the government instead of a cost center executing an expensive but necessary regulatory action. The patent courts likewise have not worked anything out "carefully" because a court can not "think" it can only "rule on the questions before it" and none of the litigants with enough money to see it through have asked the important questions like "should software even be patentable".
So yea, a heck of a lot more stoneware needs to be smashed under bovine hooves before we are likely to have restored any rationality to the world of patents.
Caveat Emptor buddy. "Let The Buyer Beware" has been the rule of exchange for thousands of years.
The easy U.S. lawsuit machine has made a small but lucrative Caveat Vendor skim stuff off the top of the market, but the definition of economy is "take what you can get from any you can get it from."
I'm only ever surprised when I meet someone who thinks this is new to our age, or surprising.
You will note that the signature is separated from the vote. When you last went to vote (presuming you _have_ done so), you were required to sign the register. Your ballot was then given to you, and you went to your little kiosk (etc) to fill out your ballot, and then you went to the ballot box and put your vote into it. [unless you e-voted, in which case your vote may have been substituted by the machines choice, but that's a separate rant... 8-)].
The piles of ballots are public record, and available for review.
The signed log book is public record, and available for review.
So you can go and find out that you or I voted in such a place at such a date, but you have no way to determine what you or I voted for.
A petition (the paper kind we use today) is a substitute bowing to modern economies of scale, for the age old practice of being able to "Go to Court" and "petition" the court [originally the king, or then Parliament] and stand before everyone (a public, and assuredly non anonymous action) and do your utmost to _demand_ action.
Petitioning the Crown, Petitioning the Court, Petitioning Parliament, Petitioning Congress and so on have _never_ been granted anonymity because it is an attempt to enjoin or coerce action on a matter that is otherwise not of interest to the body in question. Just as with Carte Blanche, Letters of Attainder, and other such extreme applications of power; it is fundamentally unfair to hold court in secret and without accountability.
The paper thing of today is just a way to raise the bar reasonably by requiring more than one person, or a scant handful of people, in order to spur the legislative process into action; in exchange for this limit that keeps us having to address every crackpot's pet issue, we no longer require the petitioners to show up in person all at once. It's a practical trade off.
The other thing to consider, there is as much pressure to _sign_ some petitions as there is to _not_ sign others. Some guy passes around an anti-gay marriage proposal at your church and you will feel obligated to sign it, even if you already know you are going to vote against the proposition if it gets to ballot.
Without the public review process, individuals will feel the pressure to sing in the immediate, without having to consider the ramifications of signing it in the long term. How many of the people who signed this mess might not have if they knew that doing so _would_ let them off the hook there in church, but would put them _on_ the hook at work, in their local bar, and with their gay boys on the down low?
Politics was never supposed to be a dirty secret act, it is supposed to be a muddy and bloody public act.
Letting instigators rouse the rabble from within a veil of obscurity never leads to justice.
What is all the "outdated" commentary in the article, and the bemoaning of IE6. The text, typed or pasted by the very poster, lists IE6, Safari 30. and Firefox 2.0, each decorated with the words "or higher".
Those two words largely eliminate fully half the posed and inferred questions about IE6 being out of date and the whole list being backwards or whatever.
My unleaded gas is for use with a 1975 automobile or later. This doesn't make it unfit for my 2006 prius.
Someone in the editorial department needs to go listen to Monty Python's Logician sketch. It's called the _partial_ conversion of a logical statement.
It's about control. They aren't trying to "find out" how Google does google maps, they are trying to create an in-country choke point. This choke point will choke the money from leaving the country _and_ choke the information reaching the citizens.
Imagine if you were the Bureau of Stuff of Some Country, and you could take 50% of the profit on every enterprise taking place on the internet in Some Country. Imagine that you can do it by letting random enterprises do random things, and then only attach yourself once a random thing had proven profitable. This is the money half of the equation.
Now imagine you are the Bureau of No of Some Country, and you could interpose yourself at the source of each new flow of information instead of needing a "wall" to selectively keep a flood of random Yes from entering your country. You could pre-impose your No well before it became a possibility.
The control item is particularly important here because you cannot _firewall_ Google maps selectively.
Say you are a Chinese dude, and you know that "something prohibited" is right north of something else. you can get that map of something prohibited by searching for that something else and then scrolling around. If china can require the information be brokered locally, the "Mass Government Grave" won't be blacked out or filtered, it will be listed as "Xue's Farm" or "Rocky Hillside Funtime Panda Reserve". Likewise for the "Comrades of the Party Beer Volcano and Free Hooker Forest".
The problem with censoring maps by exclusion is that even the holes provide information. If you cannot control and _edit_ a map at the source, you cannot _believably_ obscure what you want obscured.
I patent a method of setting the R, G and B values to ranges between 0x0 and 0xFFFF so that you aren't allowed to use your invention in platforms with 64bit pixels.
Additionally I patent setting values to "nearly equal values" to _approximate_ gray.
Finally I patent choosing values for R G and B relative to actual or approximately equal values so as to achieve variations of intensity relative to a neutral.
You best not try to upgrade your stuff without paying me now buddy...
Remember for a moment that the word "socialist" wasn't coined until the early 1900's, but the ideas underlying the concept had been around for many, many years prior.
The preamble of our constitution includes "promote the general welfare" rather prominently. Now in that usage, that is as that word was used before The New Deal, means health care and care for the less fortunate.
Before you launch into the talking-point versus talking point debate, it would be nice to see everybody read up.
Please take a moment to really internalize these words:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"Posterity" not "citizenry"; Justice, Tranquility, Defense, Welfare, and Liberty. These are pretty lofty goals, and oddly enough, socialist to the very last.
The other thing is that analogy is more true when the _price_ of the hard good is $20 and the customer-assessed value is $5 for the hard good... how much less the value of the soft good thereafter?
I just bought, and throughly enjoyed "Alan Wake" for the Xbox 360. I would have paid virtually the same price for a non-disk (download a la Steam etc) version if it would have (a) been available, and (b) been warenteed to be available for a period similar to the existence of the DVD.
For a title I value, "no physical media" is a feature, not a bug, provided the no-physical-media version is as complete as the physical media.
I don't buy MP3s, I would buy FLACs.
That said, I wouldn't really buy most of the current "content" offered for sale in most cases because, given the wide array of choices, most of what is available is crap. Unfortunately for the **AA crap merchants, they are no longer the only crap in town.
The price point for "crap", wired into the human brain, is "free".
We invented these sanctions to make other countries do our _stupid_ stuff, the fact that this same we is now using those sanctions to back-door a policy into our legal establishment is something of a fairly obvious ploy.
1) Fail to pass intellectual land-grab law. 2) Craft "treaty" to require such land grab in other states (governments). 3) "Discover" that we now are required by treaty to have intellectual land-grab power. 4) Take case to court and get court to uphold intellectual land-grab policy.
Back-door law successful. End-Around of due process and checks-and-balances successful. Have a nice day.
Those headphone and microphone combinations you mention in your question are all available with 3.5" and 2.5" (etc.) standard connectors. If that's the kind of thing you want to use, go get one and use it. There are also several that use USB and in-device coding/decoding so if your Skype requirements involve a laptop of stationary computer, those work as well.
There are lots of full ear-cup and direct boom microphone headsets, and fully half can be used with phones, and probably a third of them are available with amplifiers in them so as not to suck the life out of a cell phone etc.
They are all just really pricey.
On my current DoD project we have tried several brands so far.
Make a conveyor belt of this stuff, the end of which dips into the water in front of a barge. Turn on belt and drive through spill. (The belt would probably have little fins on it too to make little pools in the v-shaped convergence of the fabric belt and the perpendicular fin.) This thing would look like a mesh gravel lifter (mesh under the cloth to support the weight) with a cloth liner in it.
As the belt rises a good bit of the water drains out, then at the top you go over a roller into a vertical position, which is over a receiver, then around an end roller S-curve [recline the S 90 degrees to see what I mean] before returning the belt back into the water. The S curve acts as a roller-press expeller to squeegee (as opposed to wring) the bulk of the off of the belt. The bulk mostly-oil goes into the barge for sequester or even subsequent filtration and reclamation.
Actually plain Sheep's Wool fibers on a roller could probably do this without all the problems. Have you have ever seen the chocolate lifter/mixer things where there is a bowl of chocolate and a vertical belt that the chocolate rides up and then gets squeegeed off of? Use the viscosity and weight difference and the natural affinity between wool and oil. Make something that looks like a the warp of a loom, but in the shape of a belt. Move it all pretty fast. you could probalby get a 90/10 separation pretty easily, and that would be huge when you get multiple goes since you would naturally have a containment boom around such an arrangement.
In all cases, since the conveyor is always returning to the contaminated water, the separation doesn't have to be all that perfect.
Hell, use cheap acrylic "fun fur" from the fabric shop... or seagull feathers. 8-)
Or really, really and seriously, the plastic that can bundle rings are made of, combined with a roller press, would do wonders. Actually make the Lisa Simpson Omni Net out of the original materials. Try it. Get a six-pack of cheap caned bear. Put motor or vegetable oil in water. Dip the can rings in the mixture. Water doesn't like the plastic, oil loves the plastic, plastic cannot _absorb_ the oil. Make a loose weave of the same material and you have an oil sponge that can be roller-pressed to extract the oil after it has been lifted out of the water.
The natural tendency of crude and water to self-segregate is one of our greatest tools here.
The copyright is a "temporary grant of exclusive rights" to a "public good", namely the specific expression of ideas and images (etc) granted to the creator of a creative work.
The reason a creative work is a "public good" is that it is _not_ and exclusive good nor a from of limited resource. More plainly, once expressed, an idea or image cannot be "taken back" nor does re-expression or elaboration of the ideas and images "wear out" the idea. The only reason for the temporary grant of exclusive rights is to _artificially_ allow the creator to harvest the first and best financial rewards and intangible value (renown etc) for the act of creation. Anybody who has written something and seen it ripped off to make either a high income reproduction, or a movie, or (god forbid) a giant wash of slash-fic internet porn, knows the pain of having an idea profiteered or sullied. The copyright is sort of short period of safety where a person can bask in the personal and professional and financial lime light.
In simplistic terms. All creative works "naturally belong" to the public domain. Copyright lifts a work from its fundamental public domain state for a while for the sole purpose of rewarding the creator of that work. When that expires the work is, and _must_ return to that natural state.
Copyright is not a "property right" of any sort. If you want to own an idea, then you must never express it (which is called a "trade secret" by the way). Copyright is a right to control copying. It's right there in the name. In general it includes full fidelity duplication _and_ obfuscated perturbations such as "he copied my paper and changed the names" kinder-school grade ripoff artists.
This isn't even a "fine distinction" between property rights and copyright.
Just because the perpetrators of DRM say the "R" stands for "rights" doesn't make it so. Also most DRM schemes don't involve any sort of "management", they are permanent defects in the method of delivery. DRM is more correctly a machine to deny access. If it was about copyright, then the real copy you just bought would, by definition, not have any DRM on it since it is a _real_ copy and you just _bought_ _it_ which _exhausts_ the creators right to control that copy. Further I can lift the entire contents of a Content Scrambling System (CSS) data stream from one DVD and re write it onto a blank DVD and still end up with a playable DVD. It did nothing with respect to making a copy. All CCS does is falsely, and pretty much illegally, require me to use an approved player, where "approved" means "bought from someone who paid a kickback to 'license' the decoder". And even having bought the fully licensed DVD player, if I install it in a computer where I use an operating system that didn't pay that protection racket, or use a player or CODEC from someone that didn't pay that protection money, I somehow _lose_ the "right" to the copy I bought?
It's crap. DRM is indistinguishable from all previous protection and licensing scams that were defeated with respect to movies, and car dealerships and all the other "exclusive" (e.g. anti-competitive) attempted seizures market segments. The courts just haven't caught up yet. We have always had people making up technologies to do this sort of thing. "Special" wrenches and bolts to make sure you had to bring your car back to the dealer. symmetrically deformed lenses and film sizes to make sure only projectors made by a particular studio could project movies made by that studio. It's all been done before, and _eventually_ it all gets struck down.
Worst of all, when the "temporary" period of copyright lapses, the DRM _cannot_ just evaporate. The disks don't rewrite themselves with the contents unencrypted when the expression falls back into the public domain. That's why DRM is _theft_ of a public good. It technically renders permanent a right that was granted only temporarily.
So yes, you have conflated copyright and DRM, and _falsely_ presumed that my utter disdain for the latter in any way suggest some lack
... look how easy it is to screw up when you are using imaginary numbers in fantasy settings to demonstrate nonsense. It's really quite easy to drop a few zeros... (my bad... math fail. 8-)
Consider the fourth option where these numbers are just freaking made up by people who don't care to use statistics correctly.
If, for perspective of scale, you consider that this the entire national debit of the US went up from 9 to 12 trillion USD, or 3,000 billion USD, and this claim is covers 45 billion USD, that would mean that the loss claimed by this study is 1.5% of the increase of the US national debit. And this isn't for all "content", nor all software, nor all video games, but just the _portable_ video games. And not the hardware either. Just the software part. So if we say that for every person who just has to have a DS there are 10 who had to have a PS/3, and for every one who had a PS/3, there were 10 who wanted to watch movies or use software in general, then the entire unadjusted dollar increase in the US national debit would be overshadowed by "content".
Yea, that's a "straw man" if I were going to attack it, but lets just skip that. The above was for perspective on the magnitude of the bald-face claim.
Now, when you consider everything that people can and must spend money on, "entertainment" is nothing compared to food and shelter and food and medicine and food and education and food and insurance so on. (did I mention food?) In 2007 there were 116,011,000 "households" in the us. If the US were to shoulder the burden of paying for all these "lost sales" each household would have to pony up 50 thousand ($50,000) above whatever they already spent on, well everything, including "portable games" they actually bought. That's a full working adult making a very reasonable, or even "nice" living added to each household in the US _just_ to pay for the portable game software.
Heck, there are six billion people on the planet. To recover the sales these people "lost", e.g. 45 billion just in portable gaming software, and we spread that out to every single person uniformly, regardless of their ability to own or use a portable gaming device, everybody has to go by an $8 bargain-bin super mario cartridge.
And they each have to do it while still spending 100% of the money they are already spending to live and do something other than play dominoes with their cartridge (surely there are not 6 billion used DS units available so these people can actually run the content...).
Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason. Food would have to come free from space aliens every day for the rest of the economy to support this pipe dream "lost sales" figure.
That is, in the same sense that "if pigs could fly, bacon would be super expensive" it may well be true that if everything these people dream of happened, and each possible download represented a lost full price sale, well then sure, with those "ifs", these numbers work. But without those preposterous ifs, the results are ridiculous.
Insupportable, criminally ridiculous claims should be met with thrown stones and brandished pitchforks. Until that happy day when people really think about what these numbers would _require_ as a founding assumption, we will be sucking swill from the teat of political fantasy.
There exists no mathematical world where the portable gaming industry could have "lost $45 billion 2010-valued-USD to piracy".
Its like asking what would happen if _you_ had all the money in the world. (hint: whatever it was you had, it would be useless). You can model and dream about the scenario all you want, but it has no foundation in possible reality.
The person doesn't have to know that the material is "not copyrighted" so much as the person has to know that their actions are against the interest and intent of the copyright holder.
For instance I could record a track of music, put it on my web page with a message "please share this with your friends", and subsequent distribution would not be infringement of my copyright.
And even so, if my record label put out a CD of my work with the same song on it and someone ripped that track and started passing _it_ around things would get tricky.
In both cases there is a copyrighted work, and in both cases there is copying, but there is no _obvious_ way to know if a given file is from the free-to-share or the infringing origin.
Now for any track where the person has no knowledge of either origin, or indeed no knowledge of any origin what so ever, there is still copyright. If that file is being massively shared with the public there really isn't any reason for an uninformed person to presume their action of copying would be improper.
And while there is a lot of infringing work out there, given the scarcity of record contracts, the commonality of stupid marketing gags, the ubiquity of public domain and free-to-share works by independent artists, and the near universal ignorance of the general public to issues like this; well innocent infringement is likely the norm.
At this very moment vivo is "giving away" near-first quality streams of major artists. Their service, via youtube deliberately and directly copies those music videos to my hard disk. It is _trivial_ for me to retain those copies were I to so chose. Are those copies then legal or illegal? What if they are landing on my network server by simple dint of the fact that I have several diskless workstations? What of the copy that ends up in the "wastebasket" (undelete folder)? Since they force-fed me the copy, literally gave it to me with no clear licensing terms, what are my rights? what are my responsibilities? What of my dumb-ass peers who find this stuff accumulating somewhere with no idea of provenance?
The basic fact is that the "content producers" (not even the artists) and their lawyers are trying to present this fantasy of a black-and-white world where everything is black by default and data simply cannot move unless someone exercises deliberate and knowledgeable positive action.
As an exemplar aside: Right now, do you think you _know_ what is in your browser cache? Are you sure there isn't kiddie porn, or at least highly questionable porn? You probably think you do. The state will hold you responsible for it if they find it. But given the near certainty that you have fallen into egregious and disgusting sites of deviant content purely by accident. It's also sure as death that that site put a lot of stuff in your browser cache that you have no idea about what so ever. That you never even saw to begin with because you would have had to click on a gallery link to have even seen it. And even if its all legal, and not embarrassing in the slightest, its all copyrighted and if you back up your computer you are infringing on that copyright with no knowledge of it what so ever.
Innocent infringement is the norm. It happens constantly. It would be exceptionally dangerous if the courts were to just declare that it was impossible per se.
No actually, its not "becomming one". The people who have become disenchanted with their existing religion have taken their initial, inadequate, and over-blown imagining of something and decided to erect a new false idol to replace their old false idol.
The fact that these idolators have chosen to stamp the word Science on their alter, and have taken up the trappings of what they beleive to be science, and then fool other people who presume there exists congruence where "strong evidence" and "confidence" and "idology" into thinking that they "practice Science" is no real surprise. The average religious person could be sold a cheese sandwich as a religion if you knew exactly how to dress it up for their individual needs.
So there _are_ people who have made a religion out of "Science" and for that matter "Atheism" or "Rationality" but in neither case are these people actually engaged in these pursuits per se. The first hint is the capitalization. None of these terms are big-letter nouns. They are, when truthfully applied, little-letter labels for procedures.
Saying big-letter Science for reference to the scientific method, is like saying you "practice Dishes" because have washed your dishes out in the sink.
The scientific method produces scientific results. The method is (1) make your best guess; (2) figure out how many ways your guess could be wrong; (3) figure out if you can produce a procedure that can demonstrate any one of those ways; (4) execute that procedure; (5) if the procedure does prove your guess wrong go back to step one; (6) if your procedure fails to prove your guess wrong tell everybody to see if they can kill your guess by starting at step 2. (7) if nobody can come up with working disproof, presume your guess is right until someone _can_ come up with a disproof, then go to step 1.
See thats a process, not a state of being. And nothing ever gets "off the table" in science. The best theories are those that spend the longest time in step 7.
Thats it. The only "faith" involved is the sure and certain knowledge that if your guess has been at step seven long enough, there is some young turk out there who can totally make a name for himself by knocking it down. That is, there is a faith in human nature there, that someone will want to one-up you. That's right, just faith that someone eventually _will_ find a way to piss in your Cheerios. Its the ultimate game of king-of-the-mountain. And that's the best way we have found to-date to make sure that nothing is ever enshrined as "true".
The people who are full of religion just assume that everybody else has _something_ that feels the same to them. When they see someone who isn't filled with religion they are compelled to believe that person has some pursuit "in that mental slot". There is no real fault to this since many people "find science" as a new religion instead of actually engaging in any scientific pursuit whatsoever. There are so many of these souls that it becomes almost reasonable to believe that mistake is universal. But this is the result of confirmation bias. The faithful seek to confirm that everyone is adherent to some faith.
Here is the first clue: True Science(tm) never _proves_ anything. Really. NEVER PROVES ANYTHING. There is no such thing as "scientific proof". There is strong scientific evidence (e.g. a large body of exercises that end in step six) and so on.
That is also why it is so obvious and exasperating for any person of rational thought to deal with a religious person when that religious person conflates their religion with science. All those books and pundits which attempt to prove some religious point "scientifically". It literally cannot be done. Any attempt to prove anything is outside the scientific method, that is it is inherently unscientific.
This frustrates the scientist because its like having somebody come to a curling match with a book on american rules football and trying to prove the a sweeper was offsides. It just doesn't apply no matter how hard the outsider t
I am an author and I am seeking to make money from my work. I am not, however, seeking to DRM said work because I know that my unique combination of the facts and ideas, combined with my original thought is essentially a public good. That is, kept private it serves nobody including myself, and in the long run (if its any good anyway) it should outlive me. How do I know that "most" of my novel is "stolen"? I am not an idiot, I have been to tvtropes, I have read homer (well in part, it was an assignment in a terribly boring class that killed my love of mythology), I have read the bible, in general I am aware of the impossibility of thought and expression in a vacuum of common ideas and symbolism. In short, I am an author.
I am more-so a programmer and technologist, since these are the fields where I regularly earn my pay. My tenure in these fields goes far beyond the windows and mac and linux stuff. I remember when mainframes were delivered chock full of software from IBM and along with the runtime images of the copyrighted software came source tapes because IBM knew that you would find bugs and need to make changes and so on.
So none of your reductio ad absurdum "extensions" to my reasoning are what they are.
I used the scare quotes for "thieves" not because I am a troll, but because I don't actually buy into the terms.
So you conflate my pure and utter distain for DRM into a "you must be against copyright" argument, and then you seek to defeat _that_ instead of my point. This is a classic and tiresome example of the straw man technique. [I am utterly against software patents, as software is clearly a matter for copyright not patents, since software is _written_ etc. but I am not against "the patent system" as a whole, since properly used by practicing entities and true inventors it has value.]
Copyright doesn't try to steal back the content you buy by letting the purchaser revoke your keys, or simply decide to not renew some certificate. Copyright does not prevent fair use. Copyright does not tie content to the means of delivery so that 50 years from now what is being made today will essentially become lost. Copyright doesn't let Amazon suck a public domain work off the Kindle under the specious claims of a glorified electronic typesetter. Copyright doesn't require that everybody be connected to some leash server on the internet in order to access "content".
These are all crimes of DRM.
Now go take a course in basic reasoning. Learn to read the arguments presented. Check out Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Generally grow up. Then re-read my post and respond to it instead of your own presumptions.
All "content" is based on common ideas and techniques. Be they musical, lyrical, dramatic, or technological ideas and techniques, they come from us, the general populace, and the previous authors, musicians etc.
They pure _hubris_ of the "content industry" is that _their_ incremental changes are "worth more" than the total body of work and understanding their particular content is based on.
So they are in the habit of, to apply their own terms to their own actions, "stealing" and "pirating" from the common man to produce their content.
But just as there is no anti-smoking advocate as loud as an ex smoker, and nobody is as fearful of being stolen from as a thief, the "content producers", knowing fully well that 99% of their content comes from someone else, demand some way to protect "their work" from being used by the next guy.
The ideal of DRM is, in its own right, the idea of building a wall around a public good. It should not surprise _anyone_ that the DRM happy thieves are willing to steal the DRM techniques as readily as they stole story ideas and plot points.
I cry a river for any company that produces DRM, or just DRM _ideas_, and has it "stolen". Just as I cried when my next door neighbor, who had motion sensor lights all over his house and had locked fences and a specially built lockable out-building, was busted by the feds for selling ill-gotten merchandise on ebay.
Its a huge "no duh, what did you honestly expect?"
The real smart users don't do "real things" via "go back" or "left open" windows. When I bank etc, I use a freshly opened window (if not always browser, but one can only by so paranoid) opened with file-new not ctrl-n etc. Then I do my business and get out.
Sure my slashdot.org and my social and dating site kinda crap stays logged in, but so what.
If it's real business I don't go there unless I typed the URL by hand. I don't even bookmark the sites for my bank and credit card etc because _I_ have been expecting the bookmark rewriting attack as more likely than tab reassignment. But who am I to judge...
As long as kill has a value other than zero, the loop will run forever because the expression value of (bad=kill) is the value of kill.
The original code is indeterminate. The correction is incorrect for saying "never", as most possible definitions of "kill" would be non-zero unless bad was extremely negative and kill were more positive than bad.
If you are going to be pedantic, be definitively pedantic.
I never said _anything_ about medieval anywhere or anybody, nor any church.
Methinks that you are too used to reading your own assumptions into texts and so you _presumed_ I was talking about that epoch. I never mentioned a date or culture. I am aware of the correct dates and cultures for the discovery of round-earth. The specific references to time and place were not relevant to the conversation so were not cited.
You may be educated but you clearly have not learned to process argument without presumption.
Remember the adage, "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him think" and in this case your corrective and admonistrative tone is all wet.
Why might I want an automatic weapon? Hunting my ass, that argument should never have been raised.
You just never know when you might need to kill a non-trivial number of people in rapid succession.
That is neither a jest nor a threat. The express purpose of the second amendment to the constitution can be found in any civics book when reading about the actions of the British Red Coats as an occupying force. This is actually true of virtually all of the bill of rights. The citizenry is _supposed_ to have the right to be individually at _least_ as well armed as any member of the government.
As for guns, its supposed to function as the voting right of last resort. There are always more citizens, and if it comes to it they have the right to oust the constabulary or the government if it gets out of control.
The constitution was, after all, written by a bunch of Revolutionary Idealists who, by definition believed in the right of popular revolt.
But then again yea, if only patent trolls are allowed to have guns then only criminals will be patent trolls or something... 8-)
The patent trolls would be able to easily argue prior art by pointing to themselves, or slashdot (in particular your posting of the idea and everyone who has posted the same idea over and over again for the last ten years).
Now enacting a law that it was legal to shoot to 5% disable any lawyer who files any motion for any NPE wouldn't go amiss. After all, 5% of the gross should be fair and non-discriminatory entropy cost to the practitioner, right?
Dude, make two identical objects place the first, place the second exactly one mile due north of the first, measure the differences in the shadows. Now do it 5 to 10 _thousand_ years ago in the equatorial region...
The flat earth theory, given the age of its inception and the precision of measurement at the time of its inception, was an _amazing_ advancement in human thought and understanding.
Advance to 200BC when Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the earth to with 5% of the actual by having a guy _pace_ _off_ a _fifty_ _mile_ distance and then measuring a shadow to the degree of accuracy available of in the day for something casting a shadow while only 50 miles from the equator.
The fact that in hindsight we can place and measure objects much further away in much different circumstances doesn't change the fact that the flat earth hypothesis was only wrong by fractions of a single percentage.
The point being that "all science is eventually proven wrong" is a statement much like "statistical significance" in that most people don't understand what the terms _really_ mean. On average, old science is proved wrong by hairs breadths and slivers (given the technology of any given proof). [ASIDE: statistical significance is a term meaning nothing more than "large enough to be measured" as opposed to being huge/obvious/important.]
In the terms of this article, 1% is a ginormous amount of variance from the standard model that dwarfs the flat earth vs round earth thing. (etc.)
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Nothing, as near as I can tell, has been "carefully worked out" by the courts or the Patent Office. The PAtent office is a patent granting machine because it has become a profit center for the government instead of a cost center executing an expensive but necessary regulatory action. The patent courts likewise have not worked anything out "carefully" because a court can not "think" it can only "rule on the questions before it" and none of the litigants with enough money to see it through have asked the important questions like "should software even be patentable".
So yea, a heck of a lot more stoneware needs to be smashed under bovine hooves before we are likely to have restored any rationality to the world of patents.
Caveat Emptor buddy. "Let The Buyer Beware" has been the rule of exchange for thousands of years.
The easy U.S. lawsuit machine has made a small but lucrative Caveat Vendor skim stuff off the top of the market, but the definition of economy is "take what you can get from any you can get it from."
I'm only ever surprised when I meet someone who thinks this is new to our age, or surprising.
You will note that the signature is separated from the vote. When you last went to vote (presuming you _have_ done so), you were required to sign the register. Your ballot was then given to you, and you went to your little kiosk (etc) to fill out your ballot, and then you went to the ballot box and put your vote into it. [unless you e-voted, in which case your vote may have been substituted by the machines choice, but that's a separate rant... 8-)].
The piles of ballots are public record, and available for review.
The signed log book is public record, and available for review.
So you can go and find out that you or I voted in such a place at such a date, but you have no way to determine what you or I voted for.
A petition (the paper kind we use today) is a substitute bowing to modern economies of scale, for the age old practice of being able to "Go to Court" and "petition" the court [originally the king, or then Parliament] and stand before everyone (a public, and assuredly non anonymous action) and do your utmost to _demand_ action.
Petitioning the Crown, Petitioning the Court, Petitioning Parliament, Petitioning Congress and so on have _never_ been granted anonymity because it is an attempt to enjoin or coerce action on a matter that is otherwise not of interest to the body in question. Just as with Carte Blanche, Letters of Attainder, and other such extreme applications of power; it is fundamentally unfair to hold court in secret and without accountability.
The paper thing of today is just a way to raise the bar reasonably by requiring more than one person, or a scant handful of people, in order to spur the legislative process into action; in exchange for this limit that keeps us having to address every crackpot's pet issue, we no longer require the petitioners to show up in person all at once. It's a practical trade off.
The other thing to consider, there is as much pressure to _sign_ some petitions as there is to _not_ sign others. Some guy passes around an anti-gay marriage proposal at your church and you will feel obligated to sign it, even if you already know you are going to vote against the proposition if it gets to ballot.
Without the public review process, individuals will feel the pressure to sing in the immediate, without having to consider the ramifications of signing it in the long term. How many of the people who signed this mess might not have if they knew that doing so _would_ let them off the hook there in church, but would put them _on_ the hook at work, in their local bar, and with their gay boys on the down low?
Politics was never supposed to be a dirty secret act, it is supposed to be a muddy and bloody public act.
Letting instigators rouse the rabble from within a veil of obscurity never leads to justice.
What is all the "outdated" commentary in the article, and the bemoaning of IE6. The text, typed or pasted by the very poster, lists IE6, Safari 30. and Firefox 2.0, each decorated with the words "or higher".
Those two words largely eliminate fully half the posed and inferred questions about IE6 being out of date and the whole list being backwards or whatever.
My unleaded gas is for use with a 1975 automobile or later. This doesn't make it unfit for my 2006 prius.
Someone in the editorial department needs to go listen to Monty Python's Logician sketch. It's called the _partial_ conversion of a logical statement.
It's about control. They aren't trying to "find out" how Google does google maps, they are trying to create an in-country choke point. This choke point will choke the money from leaving the country _and_ choke the information reaching the citizens.
Imagine if you were the Bureau of Stuff of Some Country, and you could take 50% of the profit on every enterprise taking place on the internet in Some Country. Imagine that you can do it by letting random enterprises do random things, and then only attach yourself once a random thing had proven profitable. This is the money half of the equation.
Now imagine you are the Bureau of No of Some Country, and you could interpose yourself at the source of each new flow of information instead of needing a "wall" to selectively keep a flood of random Yes from entering your country. You could pre-impose your No well before it became a possibility.
The control item is particularly important here because you cannot _firewall_ Google maps selectively.
Say you are a Chinese dude, and you know that "something prohibited" is right north of something else. you can get that map of something prohibited by searching for that something else and then scrolling around. If china can require the information be brokered locally, the "Mass Government Grave" won't be blacked out or filtered, it will be listed as "Xue's Farm" or "Rocky Hillside Funtime Panda Reserve". Likewise for the "Comrades of the Party Beer Volcano and Free Hooker Forest".
The problem with censoring maps by exclusion is that even the holes provide information. If you cannot control and _edit_ a map at the source, you cannot _believably_ obscure what you want obscured.
I patent a method of setting the R, G and B values to ranges between 0x0 and 0xFFFF so that you aren't allowed to use your invention in platforms with 64bit pixels.
Additionally I patent setting values to "nearly equal values" to _approximate_ gray.
Finally I patent choosing values for R G and B relative to actual or approximately equal values so as to achieve variations of intensity relative to a neutral.
You best not try to upgrade your stuff without paying me now buddy...
Remember for a moment that the word "socialist" wasn't coined until the early 1900's, but the ideas underlying the concept had been around for many, many years prior.
The preamble of our constitution includes "promote the general welfare" rather prominently. Now in that usage, that is as that word was used before The New Deal, means health care and care for the less fortunate.
Before you launch into the talking-point versus talking point debate, it would be nice to see everybody read up.
Please take a moment to really internalize these words:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
"Posterity" not "citizenry"; Justice, Tranquility, Defense, Welfare, and Liberty. These are pretty lofty goals, and oddly enough, socialist to the very last.
The other thing is that analogy is more true when the _price_ of the hard good is $20 and the customer-assessed value is $5 for the hard good... how much less the value of the soft good thereafter?
I just bought, and throughly enjoyed "Alan Wake" for the Xbox 360. I would have paid virtually the same price for a non-disk (download a la Steam etc) version if it would have (a) been available, and (b) been warenteed to be available for a period similar to the existence of the DVD.
For a title I value, "no physical media" is a feature, not a bug, provided the no-physical-media version is as complete as the physical media.
I don't buy MP3s, I would buy FLACs.
That said, I wouldn't really buy most of the current "content" offered for sale in most cases because, given the wide array of choices, most of what is available is crap. Unfortunately for the **AA crap merchants, they are no longer the only crap in town.
The price point for "crap", wired into the human brain, is "free".
We invented these sanctions to make other countries do our _stupid_ stuff, the fact that this same we is now using those sanctions to back-door a policy into our legal establishment is something of a fairly obvious ploy.
1) Fail to pass intellectual land-grab law.
2) Craft "treaty" to require such land grab in other states (governments).
3) "Discover" that we now are required by treaty to have intellectual land-grab power.
4) Take case to court and get court to uphold intellectual land-grab policy.
Back-door law successful. End-Around of due process and checks-and-balances successful. Have a nice day.
Your question contains your answer.
Those headphone and microphone combinations you mention in your question are all available with 3.5" and 2.5" (etc.) standard connectors. If that's the kind of thing you want to use, go get one and use it. There are also several that use USB and in-device coding/decoding so if your Skype requirements involve a laptop of stationary computer, those work as well.
There are lots of full ear-cup and direct boom microphone headsets, and fully half can be used with phones, and probably a third of them are available with amplifiers in them so as not to suck the life out of a cell phone etc.
They are all just really pricey.
On my current DoD project we have tried several brands so far.
Go to a pilot supply store and try a few.
Expect to spend $150 USD or more.
Share and enjoy. 8-)
Make a conveyor belt of this stuff, the end of which dips into the water in front of a barge. Turn on belt and drive through spill. (The belt would probably have little fins on it too to make little pools in the v-shaped convergence of the fabric belt and the perpendicular fin.) This thing would look like a mesh gravel lifter (mesh under the cloth to support the weight) with a cloth liner in it.
As the belt rises a good bit of the water drains out, then at the top you go over a roller into a vertical position, which is over a receiver, then around an end roller S-curve [recline the S 90 degrees to see what I mean] before returning the belt back into the water. The S curve acts as a roller-press expeller to squeegee (as opposed to wring) the bulk of the off of the belt. The bulk mostly-oil goes into the barge for sequester or even subsequent filtration and reclamation.
Actually plain Sheep's Wool fibers on a roller could probably do this without all the problems. Have you have ever seen the chocolate lifter/mixer things where there is a bowl of chocolate and a vertical belt that the chocolate rides up and then gets squeegeed off of? Use the viscosity and weight difference and the natural affinity between wool and oil. Make something that looks like a the warp of a loom, but in the shape of a belt. Move it all pretty fast. you could probalby get a 90/10 separation pretty easily, and that would be huge when you get multiple goes since you would naturally have a containment boom around such an arrangement.
In all cases, since the conveyor is always returning to the contaminated water, the separation doesn't have to be all that perfect.
Hell, use cheap acrylic "fun fur" from the fabric shop... or seagull feathers. 8-)
Or really, really and seriously, the plastic that can bundle rings are made of, combined with a roller press, would do wonders. Actually make the Lisa Simpson Omni Net out of the original materials. Try it. Get a six-pack of cheap caned bear. Put motor or vegetable oil in water. Dip the can rings in the mixture. Water doesn't like the plastic, oil loves the plastic, plastic cannot _absorb_ the oil. Make a loose weave of the same material and you have an oil sponge that can be roller-pressed to extract the oil after it has been lifted out of the water.
The natural tendency of crude and water to self-segregate is one of our greatest tools here.
The copyright is a "temporary grant of exclusive rights" to a "public good", namely the specific expression of ideas and images (etc) granted to the creator of a creative work.
The reason a creative work is a "public good" is that it is _not_ and exclusive good nor a from of limited resource. More plainly, once expressed, an idea or image cannot be "taken back" nor does re-expression or elaboration of the ideas and images "wear out" the idea. The only reason for the temporary grant of exclusive rights is to _artificially_ allow the creator to harvest the first and best financial rewards and intangible value (renown etc) for the act of creation. Anybody who has written something and seen it ripped off to make either a high income reproduction, or a movie, or (god forbid) a giant wash of slash-fic internet porn, knows the pain of having an idea profiteered or sullied. The copyright is sort of short period of safety where a person can bask in the personal and professional and financial lime light.
In simplistic terms. All creative works "naturally belong" to the public domain. Copyright lifts a work from its fundamental public domain state for a while for the sole purpose of rewarding the creator of that work. When that expires the work is, and _must_ return to that natural state.
Copyright is not a "property right" of any sort. If you want to own an idea, then you must never express it (which is called a "trade secret" by the way). Copyright is a right to control copying. It's right there in the name. In general it includes full fidelity duplication _and_ obfuscated perturbations such as "he copied my paper and changed the names" kinder-school grade ripoff artists.
This isn't even a "fine distinction" between property rights and copyright.
Just because the perpetrators of DRM say the "R" stands for "rights" doesn't make it so. Also most DRM schemes don't involve any sort of "management", they are permanent defects in the method of delivery. DRM is more correctly a machine to deny access. If it was about copyright, then the real copy you just bought would, by definition, not have any DRM on it since it is a _real_ copy and you just _bought_ _it_ which _exhausts_ the creators right to control that copy. Further I can lift the entire contents of a Content Scrambling System (CSS) data stream from one DVD and re write it onto a blank DVD and still end up with a playable DVD. It did nothing with respect to making a copy. All CCS does is falsely, and pretty much illegally, require me to use an approved player, where "approved" means "bought from someone who paid a kickback to 'license' the decoder". And even having bought the fully licensed DVD player, if I install it in a computer where I use an operating system that didn't pay that protection racket, or use a player or CODEC from someone that didn't pay that protection money, I somehow _lose_ the "right" to the copy I bought?
It's crap. DRM is indistinguishable from all previous protection and licensing scams that were defeated with respect to movies, and car dealerships and all the other "exclusive" (e.g. anti-competitive) attempted seizures market segments. The courts just haven't caught up yet. We have always had people making up technologies to do this sort of thing. "Special" wrenches and bolts to make sure you had to bring your car back to the dealer. symmetrically deformed lenses and film sizes to make sure only projectors made by a particular studio could project movies made by that studio. It's all been done before, and _eventually_ it all gets struck down.
Worst of all, when the "temporary" period of copyright lapses, the DRM _cannot_ just evaporate. The disks don't rewrite themselves with the contents unencrypted when the expression falls back into the public domain. That's why DRM is _theft_ of a public good. It technically renders permanent a right that was granted only temporarily.
So yes, you have conflated copyright and DRM, and _falsely_ presumed that my utter disdain for the latter in any way suggest some lack
... look how easy it is to screw up when you are using imaginary numbers in fantasy settings to demonstrate nonsense. It's really quite easy to drop a few zeros... (my bad... math fail. 8-)
Consider the fourth option where these numbers are just freaking made up by people who don't care to use statistics correctly.
If, for perspective of scale, you consider that this the entire national debit of the US went up from 9 to 12 trillion USD, or 3,000 billion USD, and this claim is covers 45 billion USD, that would mean that the loss claimed by this study is 1.5% of the increase of the US national debit. And this isn't for all "content", nor all software, nor all video games, but just the _portable_ video games. And not the hardware either. Just the software part. So if we say that for every person who just has to have a DS there are 10 who had to have a PS/3, and for every one who had a PS/3, there were 10 who wanted to watch movies or use software in general, then the entire unadjusted dollar increase in the US national debit would be overshadowed by "content".
Yea, that's a "straw man" if I were going to attack it, but lets just skip that. The above was for perspective on the magnitude of the bald-face claim.
Now, when you consider everything that people can and must spend money on, "entertainment" is nothing compared to food and shelter and food and medicine and food and education and food and insurance so on. (did I mention food?) In 2007 there were 116,011,000 "households" in the us. If the US were to shoulder the burden of paying for all these "lost sales" each household would have to pony up 50 thousand ($50,000) above whatever they already spent on, well everything, including "portable games" they actually bought. That's a full working adult making a very reasonable, or even "nice" living added to each household in the US _just_ to pay for the portable game software.
Heck, there are six billion people on the planet. To recover the sales these people "lost", e.g. 45 billion just in portable gaming software, and we spread that out to every single person uniformly, regardless of their ability to own or use a portable gaming device, everybody has to go by an $8 bargain-bin super mario cartridge.
And they each have to do it while still spending 100% of the money they are already spending to live and do something other than play dominoes with their cartridge (surely there are not 6 billion used DS units available so these people can actually run the content...).
Redirecting that kind of money into the phantom sales scenario needed to back up these numbers literally flies in the face of economic reason. Food would have to come free from space aliens every day for the rest of the economy to support this pipe dream "lost sales" figure.
That is, in the same sense that "if pigs could fly, bacon would be super expensive" it may well be true that if everything these people dream of happened, and each possible download represented a lost full price sale, well then sure, with those "ifs", these numbers work. But without those preposterous ifs, the results are ridiculous.
Insupportable, criminally ridiculous claims should be met with thrown stones and brandished pitchforks. Until that happy day when people really think about what these numbers would _require_ as a founding assumption, we will be sucking swill from the teat of political fantasy.
There exists no mathematical world where the portable gaming industry could have "lost $45 billion 2010-valued-USD to piracy".
Its like asking what would happen if _you_ had all the money in the world. (hint: whatever it was you had, it would be useless). You can model and dream about the scenario all you want, but it has no foundation in possible reality.
The person doesn't have to know that the material is "not copyrighted" so much as the person has to know that their actions are against the interest and intent of the copyright holder.
For instance I could record a track of music, put it on my web page with a message "please share this with your friends", and subsequent distribution would not be infringement of my copyright.
And even so, if my record label put out a CD of my work with the same song on it and someone ripped that track and started passing _it_ around things would get tricky.
In both cases there is a copyrighted work, and in both cases there is copying, but there is no _obvious_ way to know if a given file is from the free-to-share or the infringing origin.
Now for any track where the person has no knowledge of either origin, or indeed no knowledge of any origin what so ever, there is still copyright. If that file is being massively shared with the public there really isn't any reason for an uninformed person to presume their action of copying would be improper.
And while there is a lot of infringing work out there, given the scarcity of record contracts, the commonality of stupid marketing gags, the ubiquity of public domain and free-to-share works by independent artists, and the near universal ignorance of the general public to issues like this; well innocent infringement is likely the norm.
At this very moment vivo is "giving away" near-first quality streams of major artists. Their service, via youtube deliberately and directly copies those music videos to my hard disk. It is _trivial_ for me to retain those copies were I to so chose. Are those copies then legal or illegal? What if they are landing on my network server by simple dint of the fact that I have several diskless workstations? What of the copy that ends up in the "wastebasket" (undelete folder)? Since they force-fed me the copy, literally gave it to me with no clear licensing terms, what are my rights? what are my responsibilities? What of my dumb-ass peers who find this stuff accumulating somewhere with no idea of provenance?
The basic fact is that the "content producers" (not even the artists) and their lawyers are trying to present this fantasy of a black-and-white world where everything is black by default and data simply cannot move unless someone exercises deliberate and knowledgeable positive action.
As an exemplar aside: Right now, do you think you _know_ what is in your browser cache? Are you sure there isn't kiddie porn, or at least highly questionable porn? You probably think you do. The state will hold you responsible for it if they find it. But given the near certainty that you have fallen into egregious and disgusting sites of deviant content purely by accident. It's also sure as death that that site put a lot of stuff in your browser cache that you have no idea about what so ever. That you never even saw to begin with because you would have had to click on a gallery link to have even seen it. And even if its all legal, and not embarrassing in the slightest, its all copyrighted and if you back up your computer you are infringing on that copyright with no knowledge of it what so ever.
Innocent infringement is the norm. It happens constantly. It would be exceptionally dangerous if the courts were to just declare that it was impossible per se.
No actually, its not "becomming one". The people who have become disenchanted with their existing religion have taken their initial, inadequate, and over-blown imagining of something and decided to erect a new false idol to replace their old false idol.
The fact that these idolators have chosen to stamp the word Science on their alter, and have taken up the trappings of what they beleive to be science, and then fool other people who presume there exists congruence where "strong evidence" and "confidence" and "idology" into thinking that they "practice Science" is no real surprise. The average religious person could be sold a cheese sandwich as a religion if you knew exactly how to dress it up for their individual needs.
So there _are_ people who have made a religion out of "Science" and for that matter "Atheism" or "Rationality" but in neither case are these people actually engaged in these pursuits per se. The first hint is the capitalization. None of these terms are big-letter nouns. They are, when truthfully applied, little-letter labels for procedures.
Saying big-letter Science for reference to the scientific method, is like saying you "practice Dishes" because have washed your dishes out in the sink.
The scientific method produces scientific results. The method is (1) make your best guess; (2) figure out how many ways your guess could be wrong; (3) figure out if you can produce a procedure that can demonstrate any one of those ways; (4) execute that procedure; (5) if the procedure does prove your guess wrong go back to step one; (6) if your procedure fails to prove your guess wrong tell everybody to see if they can kill your guess by starting at step 2. (7) if nobody can come up with working disproof, presume your guess is right until someone _can_ come up with a disproof, then go to step 1.
See thats a process, not a state of being. And nothing ever gets "off the table" in science. The best theories are those that spend the longest time in step 7.
Thats it. The only "faith" involved is the sure and certain knowledge that if your guess has been at step seven long enough, there is some young turk out there who can totally make a name for himself by knocking it down. That is, there is a faith in human nature there, that someone will want to one-up you. That's right, just faith that someone eventually _will_ find a way to piss in your Cheerios. Its the ultimate game of king-of-the-mountain. And that's the best way we have found to-date to make sure that nothing is ever enshrined as "true".
The people who are full of religion just assume that everybody else has _something_ that feels the same to them. When they see someone who isn't filled with religion they are compelled to believe that person has some pursuit "in that mental slot". There is no real fault to this since many people "find science" as a new religion instead of actually engaging in any scientific pursuit whatsoever. There are so many of these souls that it becomes almost reasonable to believe that mistake is universal. But this is the result of confirmation bias. The faithful seek to confirm that everyone is adherent to some faith.
Here is the first clue: True Science(tm) never _proves_ anything. Really. NEVER PROVES ANYTHING. There is no such thing as "scientific proof". There is strong scientific evidence (e.g. a large body of exercises that end in step six) and so on.
That is also why it is so obvious and exasperating for any person of rational thought to deal with a religious person when that religious person conflates their religion with science. All those books and pundits which attempt to prove some religious point "scientifically". It literally cannot be done. Any attempt to prove anything is outside the scientific method, that is it is inherently unscientific.
This frustrates the scientist because its like having somebody come to a curling match with a book on american rules football and trying to prove the a sweeper was offsides. It just doesn't apply no matter how hard the outsider t
I am an author and I am seeking to make money from my work. I am not, however, seeking to DRM said work because I know that my unique combination of the facts and ideas, combined with my original thought is essentially a public good. That is, kept private it serves nobody including myself, and in the long run (if its any good anyway) it should outlive me. How do I know that "most" of my novel is "stolen"? I am not an idiot, I have been to tvtropes, I have read homer (well in part, it was an assignment in a terribly boring class that killed my love of mythology), I have read the bible, in general I am aware of the impossibility of thought and expression in a vacuum of common ideas and symbolism. In short, I am an author.
I am more-so a programmer and technologist, since these are the fields where I regularly earn my pay. My tenure in these fields goes far beyond the windows and mac and linux stuff. I remember when mainframes were delivered chock full of software from IBM and along with the runtime images of the copyrighted software came source tapes because IBM knew that you would find bugs and need to make changes and so on.
So none of your reductio ad absurdum "extensions" to my reasoning are what they are.
I used the scare quotes for "thieves" not because I am a troll, but because I don't actually buy into the terms.
So you conflate my pure and utter distain for DRM into a "you must be against copyright" argument, and then you seek to defeat _that_ instead of my point. This is a classic and tiresome example of the straw man technique. [I am utterly against software patents, as software is clearly a matter for copyright not patents, since software is _written_ etc. but I am not against "the patent system" as a whole, since properly used by practicing entities and true inventors it has value.]
Copyright doesn't try to steal back the content you buy by letting the purchaser revoke your keys, or simply decide to not renew some certificate. Copyright does not prevent fair use. Copyright does not tie content to the means of delivery so that 50 years from now what is being made today will essentially become lost. Copyright doesn't let Amazon suck a public domain work off the Kindle under the specious claims of a glorified electronic typesetter. Copyright doesn't require that everybody be connected to some leash server on the internet in order to access "content".
These are all crimes of DRM.
Now go take a course in basic reasoning. Learn to read the arguments presented. Check out Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Generally grow up. Then re-read my post and respond to it instead of your own presumptions.
All "content" is based on common ideas and techniques. Be they musical, lyrical, dramatic, or technological ideas and techniques, they come from us, the general populace, and the previous authors, musicians etc.
They pure _hubris_ of the "content industry" is that _their_ incremental changes are "worth more" than the total body of work and understanding their particular content is based on.
So they are in the habit of, to apply their own terms to their own actions, "stealing" and "pirating" from the common man to produce their content.
But just as there is no anti-smoking advocate as loud as an ex smoker, and nobody is as fearful of being stolen from as a thief, the "content producers", knowing fully well that 99% of their content comes from someone else, demand some way to protect "their work" from being used by the next guy.
The ideal of DRM is, in its own right, the idea of building a wall around a public good. It should not surprise _anyone_ that the DRM happy thieves are willing to steal the DRM techniques as readily as they stole story ideas and plot points.
I cry a river for any company that produces DRM, or just DRM _ideas_, and has it "stolen". Just as I cried when my next door neighbor, who had motion sensor lights all over his house and had locked fences and a specially built lockable out-building, was busted by the feds for selling ill-gotten merchandise on ebay.
Its a huge "no duh, what did you honestly expect?"
The real smart users don't do "real things" via "go back" or "left open" windows. When I bank etc, I use a freshly opened window (if not always browser, but one can only by so paranoid) opened with file-new not ctrl-n etc. Then I do my business and get out.
Sure my slashdot.org and my social and dating site kinda crap stays logged in, but so what.
If it's real business I don't go there unless I typed the URL by hand. I don't even bookmark the sites for my bank and credit card etc because _I_ have been expecting the bookmark rewriting attack as more likely than tab reassignment. But who am I to judge...
dude, as long as kill is not zero, the loop will run forever because the second assignment would be true.
As long as kill has a value other than zero, the loop will run forever because the expression value of (bad=kill) is the value of kill.
The original code is indeterminate. The correction is incorrect for saying "never", as most possible definitions of "kill" would be non-zero unless bad was extremely negative and kill were more positive than bad.
If you are going to be pedantic, be definitively pedantic.
(Presuming "C" of course.)
I never said _anything_ about medieval anywhere or anybody, nor any church.
Methinks that you are too used to reading your own assumptions into texts and so you _presumed_ I was talking about that epoch. I never mentioned a date or culture. I am aware of the correct dates and cultures for the discovery of round-earth. The specific references to time and place were not relevant to the conversation so were not cited.
You may be educated but you clearly have not learned to process argument without presumption.
Remember the adage, "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him think" and in this case your corrective and admonistrative tone is all wet.
As long as everyone gets one.
Why might I want an automatic weapon? Hunting my ass, that argument should never have been raised.
You just never know when you might need to kill a non-trivial number of people in rapid succession.
That is neither a jest nor a threat. The express purpose of the second amendment to the constitution can be found in any civics book when reading about the actions of the British Red Coats as an occupying force. This is actually true of virtually all of the bill of rights. The citizenry is _supposed_ to have the right to be individually at _least_ as well armed as any member of the government.
As for guns, its supposed to function as the voting right of last resort. There are always more citizens, and if it comes to it they have the right to oust the constabulary or the government if it gets out of control.
The constitution was, after all, written by a bunch of Revolutionary Idealists who, by definition believed in the right of popular revolt.
But then again yea, if only patent trolls are allowed to have guns then only criminals will be patent trolls or something... 8-)
The patent trolls would be able to easily argue prior art by pointing to themselves, or slashdot (in particular your posting of the idea and everyone who has posted the same idea over and over again for the last ten years).
Now enacting a law that it was legal to shoot to 5% disable any lawyer who files any motion for any NPE wouldn't go amiss. After all, 5% of the gross should be fair and non-discriminatory entropy cost to the practitioner, right?
Dude, make two identical objects place the first, place the second exactly one mile due north of the first, measure the differences in the shadows. Now do it 5 to 10 _thousand_ years ago in the equatorial region...
The flat earth theory, given the age of its inception and the precision of measurement at the time of its inception, was an _amazing_ advancement in human thought and understanding.
Advance to 200BC when Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the earth to with 5% of the actual by having a guy _pace_ _off_ a _fifty_ _mile_ distance and then measuring a shadow to the degree of accuracy available of in the day for something casting a shadow while only 50 miles from the equator.
The fact that in hindsight we can place and measure objects much further away in much different circumstances doesn't change the fact that the flat earth hypothesis was only wrong by fractions of a single percentage.
The point being that "all science is eventually proven wrong" is a statement much like "statistical significance" in that most people don't understand what the terms _really_ mean. On average, old science is proved wrong by hairs breadths and slivers (given the technology of any given proof). [ASIDE: statistical significance is a term meaning nothing more than "large enough to be measured" as opposed to being huge/obvious/important.]
In the terms of this article, 1% is a ginormous amount of variance from the standard model that dwarfs the flat earth vs round earth thing. (etc.)