What they say is allowed, and what is allowed by law are not necessarily the same. And since you have not agreed to any contract, you only have to follow the law, not what they say. (Of course, I'm sure Second Life and Electric Sheep have signed a contract with MLB.)
By law, the question is whether the work is a derived work of the original. A full play-by-play or reenactment would clearly be a derived work. An "account" of the game that merely summarizes what happened would not be a derived work. And because such an account is based on facts, there's no copyright protection of facts. Where things get grey would be something like a re-enactment based on facts instead of based on a video, audio, or text play-by-play description.
I had a really nice Sony 900 MHz phone back when that was the best technology available. I really liked that phone. Then one of the push-buttons stopped working. I used the same piece-of-paper trick to fix it. That worked for a while, but then the piece of paper got squishy. And it bent the rubber/plastic enough that I was unable to replace the piece of paper a 2nd time and make it all fit together and work properly.
The GPL is not a EULA. You do not have to agree to the GPL to use the software. (It states this, right in the text of the GPL.) You only have to agree to the GPL if you want to distribute or modify the software.
So the GPL is a Distribution (of Copies of Copyrighted Materials) License Agreement, not an End-User License Agreement.
To correct your analogy, the GPL would say that you can't copy and modify the intellectual property embedded in the car and sell it, without allowing others to do the same. A typical EULA would tell you that you have to stop driving the car if you use it on a non-supported road, or if you open the hood yourself, or go to an independent mechanic.
if the university does not wish for them to associate with a particular location and makes it a condition of the contract, the athletes have a choice of whether or not they wish to continue.
Um. I'm pretty sure that staying off MySpace was not a part of the contract that they signed a year or so ago when they became student athletes. Plus, a lot of athletes are not receiving any athletic scholarships. Why do they have to abide by the "contract"?
It's one thing to require a code of conduct. It's another to tell people where they can and cannot go.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Us Americans aren't very familiar with the names of British satellite receiving stations. These are the only 2 references I've seen of Goonhilly.
I'd prefer to see a toolkit that provides unobtrusive JavaScript. Basically, you'd tag (with a specific class) the HTML elements that you'd want to act as UI widgets. Then include the JavaScript file, and the JavaScript file does all the work. This provides graceful degradation -- if they don't have JavaScript, they just get the original HTML. And it lets you use all your standard HTML tools, so your designers can still handle all the look and feel, without having to deal with anything besides HTML and CSS.
Your points are valid. But so are the wind tunnel experiments.
The experiments can provide a lot of things that cannot be seen in the hurricane-damaged houses. They can monitor in real-time how the buildings get damaged. They can isolate wind damage from rain, debris, and flood damage. Most importantly, they can quickly test several different construction methods to see how well they fare against the winds. Does a nail at a 10 degree angle hold together against 50% more wind than a nail straight in? These are the kinds of things that can help improve housing codes and save a few people's homes.
No this won't help figure out how to prevent flood damage. (As you said, we already know the best way to do that.) But it will play a small part in helping people survive future hurricanes with their homes intact.
You bring up Japan, which has interesting parallels. Back in the 1980s, we all thought that they were going to kill our economy, for the same exact reasons. It didn't happen. While I don't think that the situations are exactly the same, I think it shows that there's more hope than a lot of us think.
There are also positive sides to the current situation. We get to buy a lot of stuff cheaper than before. Our money is currently worth a lot, and we're taking advantage of that. We're also able to be more "lazy" and not spend so much time making stuff. And the economic interdependency between China and the US will make it more difficult to go to war with each other.
On the negative side, I agree that it could become a problem that we no longer manufacture a lot of the things that we need. If we ever get cut off, it would hurt us a lot. A lot of what we still produce here is entertainment and "intellectual property". If the world ever gets pissed enough to fix the intellectual property treaties, we're in trouble. (But we deserve it.)
I think there's a reasonable chance that the US will run into serious economic problems due to the trade imbalance with China, our excessive national debt, our poor savings, and our outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. Again, I think we have it coming, and I think it might help us to stop being so arrogant (and influential) as a nation.
China is not interested in economic competition with the United States. It wants to eliminate the U.S. from the world scene as a viable competitor.
The rest of your post was reasonable, if not a bit one-sided. But this part is a bit off the farm. The US is the largest buyer of Chinese products. If China eliminated the US as a competitor, we wouldn't have enough money to buy their stuff. It's interesting to compare economic competitive strategies with strategies for biological viruses -- the best strategy is not to kill the host.
When I worked at CompUSA in 1994, ECS motherboards were the best we had available. All the techs used them in our own PCs.
I think perhaps the reason you think ECS is crap is that you're dealing with OEM pieces. We had the same thing when we switched to Acer back in the day. (Before that, we used various brands, including ECS.) If you bought Acer systems, they'd have a failure rate of maybe 5%. But the Acer-made OEM boards in the CompUSA-branded systems failed like 15-20% of the time. It was clear that they had much more stringient QA of their own stuff than the un-branded OEM junk.
If you work hard enough and earn enough to be concerned with the death tax, then it's YOUR money. You earned it.
And therein lies the rub. You earned the money. Most likely that was a good thing -- you worked hard, leaving the world a better place than you found it (in terms of producing material goods and services). If your children inherit a large sum of money, then they will not have to contribute to society in that same way.
That a person should be able to decide where their money goes after they die is an arbitrary social construct. We could just as easily come up with a construct that says that money is "owned" by the government, and has to be returned to them upon death. Or that everything goes to the eldest male child.
There's also the concern about concentrating wealth and power along family lines. (Other posts in this thread go into that in more detail.) This is one of the things that the founders of the USA rebelled against. It's actually partially enshrined in our Constitution. (Article I, Section 9 says that there shall be no nobility. Article III, Section 2 prohibits punishing one's family for crimes they commit.)
And finally, there's the argument that the rich gain the most from having a stable government. (This has also been well-covered in sibling threads.) So having a "wealth tax", or at least a graduated tax with the wealthy paying a higher percentage, makes a lot of sense. But wealthy folks (especially first-generation, who have earned their own wealth) also contribute a lot of capital to help our economy grow. So think of the estate tax as a deferment of the "wealth tax", in order to allow the capital to be used most effectively.
So, there seem to be at least 3 or 4 good reasons to have an estate tax. And I've only seen one good reason to not have it. Which boils down to "it's my money". But that same reason applies to any tax. And it's actually less true in this case, because the real argument here is more like "it was my daddy's money".
I've got a pretty good solution to what you call 'aliases'. I use CSS's @import functionality. I put all my non-color CSS in a CSS file called main.css, then create 'skins' with just the color info. You don't really have any non-skin stuff in your example, so I'll have to use my own.
main.css might look like this:
h1 {font-family: arial; font-size: 18pt;} .sidebar {white-space: nowrap; width: 8.5em;} #banner h1 {width: 100%; vertical-align: middle; text-align: left; font-family: "Times New Roman", times; font-size: 32pt; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5; border-bottom: 5px solid black;} .menu {list-style-type: none; .menu li a:hover/* NOTE: This will typically get overridden. */ {color: white; background-color: black;}
green.css might look like this:
@import "main.css"; #banner h1 {color: #4A4;} .sidebar, ul.menu ul {background: #EFD;} ul.menu li a {color: #000;} ul.menu li a:hover {color: #EEE; background: #696;} #footer1 {background: #6A5;}
red.css might look like this:
@import "main.css"; #banner h1 {color: #A44;} .sidebar, ul.menu ul {background: #D66;} ul.menu li a {color: #000;} ul.menu li a:hover {color: #EEE; background: #966;} #footer1 {background: #A43;}
In my HTML, I can specify one of those as the default 'skin', and the other as an alternative:
Firefox users can then select between those 2 page styles from the View menu. For bonus points, I add a JavaScript style-switcher to allow other browsers to switch using some links on the page. Using cookies, I can remember which color they chose last and make that the default -- either in JavaScript, or on the server side.
More importantly, a patent only protects the idea for 20 years. So if it were true, the patent would have expired, and plenty of companies would be able to implement it. (Yes, there's the issue of trade secrets required to make it work optimally, but the patent should be enough to get most of the efficiency, if it truly is earth-shattering.)
They probably didn't have a good continuously variable transmission to work with back then either. A CVT is another good way to keep the RPMs within the most efficient range all the time.
Do you think HTML 5 (from the WHAT WG) will have a better chance of being accepted by the browser vendors than XHTML 2.0 or whatever else comes from the W3C? (I suppose being accepted by the dominant IE would be the most important.) As a more general question, how can we best create new standards that allow backward and forward compatibility? It seems that current browsers handle current HTML versions as special cases, by looking at the HTML version string. It seems that this would break the ability for these browsers to treat HTML 5 as if it were HTML 4.
The 200 mm wafer size gives a good indication of what generation of technology it was made with. The latest fabs use 300 mm wafers; 200 mm is the most common in use today. (Another indication that you're probably right that it was meaningless to include. But they also confused 2 GHz RF with 2 GHz CPU speeds.) As you suggest, the only real advantage of the wafer size is how many chips you can make at one time.
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What they say is allowed, and what is allowed by law are not necessarily the same. And since you have not agreed to any contract, you only have to follow the law, not what they say. (Of course, I'm sure Second Life and Electric Sheep have signed a contract with MLB.)
By law, the question is whether the work is a derived work of the original. A full play-by-play or reenactment would clearly be a derived work. An "account" of the game that merely summarizes what happened would not be a derived work. And because such an account is based on facts, there's no copyright protection of facts. Where things get grey would be something like a re-enactment based on facts instead of based on a video, audio, or text play-by-play description.
AAPL stock has not been above $80 since January.
I've had that same theory about Bush myself, but had never seen it articulated anywhere. Do you have any references?
And the award for Best Selection of a Slashdot Nickname in Order to Get Modded-Up On an In-Joke goes to: "New Here".
I agree, but for a different reason.
I had a really nice Sony 900 MHz phone back when that was the best technology available. I really liked that phone. Then one of the push-buttons stopped working. I used the same piece-of-paper trick to fix it. That worked for a while, but then the piece of paper got squishy. And it bent the rubber/plastic enough that I was unable to replace the piece of paper a 2nd time and make it all fit together and work properly.
What's with those big buttons? Will people have bigger fingers in the future?
The GPL is not a EULA. You do not have to agree to the GPL to use the software. (It states this, right in the text of the GPL.) You only have to agree to the GPL if you want to distribute or modify the software.
So the GPL is a Distribution (of Copies of Copyrighted Materials) License Agreement, not an End-User License Agreement.
To correct your analogy, the GPL would say that you can't copy and modify the intellectual property embedded in the car and sell it, without allowing others to do the same. A typical EULA would tell you that you have to stop driving the car if you use it on a non-supported road, or if you open the hood yourself, or go to an independent mechanic.
if the university does not wish for them to associate with a particular location and makes it a condition of the contract, the athletes have a choice of whether or not they wish to continue.
Um. I'm pretty sure that staying off MySpace was not a part of the contract that they signed a year or so ago when they became student athletes. Plus, a lot of athletes are not receiving any athletic scholarships. Why do they have to abide by the "contract"?
It's one thing to require a code of conduct. It's another to tell people where they can and cannot go.
I was thinking the exact same thing. Us Americans aren't very familiar with the names of British satellite receiving stations. These are the only 2 references I've seen of Goonhilly.
BT's global internet protocol network
That may be the most verbose/obscure way of saying "the Internet" that I've ever seen. And why do they imply that BT owns it?
I'd prefer to see a toolkit that provides unobtrusive JavaScript. Basically, you'd tag (with a specific class) the HTML elements that you'd want to act as UI widgets. Then include the JavaScript file, and the JavaScript file does all the work. This provides graceful degradation -- if they don't have JavaScript, they just get the original HTML. And it lets you use all your standard HTML tools, so your designers can still handle all the look and feel, without having to deal with anything besides HTML and CSS.
I'm confused about why you'd put /lib on a network drive. Did you mean /var? Or am I missing something about why you'd be writing to /lib?
Your points are valid. But so are the wind tunnel experiments.
The experiments can provide a lot of things that cannot be seen in the hurricane-damaged houses. They can monitor in real-time how the buildings get damaged. They can isolate wind damage from rain, debris, and flood damage. Most importantly, they can quickly test several different construction methods to see how well they fare against the winds. Does a nail at a 10 degree angle hold together against 50% more wind than a nail straight in? These are the kinds of things that can help improve housing codes and save a few people's homes.
No this won't help figure out how to prevent flood damage. (As you said, we already know the best way to do that.) But it will play a small part in helping people survive future hurricanes with their homes intact.
You bring up Japan, which has interesting parallels. Back in the 1980s, we all thought that they were going to kill our economy, for the same exact reasons. It didn't happen. While I don't think that the situations are exactly the same, I think it shows that there's more hope than a lot of us think.
There are also positive sides to the current situation. We get to buy a lot of stuff cheaper than before. Our money is currently worth a lot, and we're taking advantage of that. We're also able to be more "lazy" and not spend so much time making stuff. And the economic interdependency between China and the US will make it more difficult to go to war with each other.
On the negative side, I agree that it could become a problem that we no longer manufacture a lot of the things that we need. If we ever get cut off, it would hurt us a lot. A lot of what we still produce here is entertainment and "intellectual property". If the world ever gets pissed enough to fix the intellectual property treaties, we're in trouble. (But we deserve it.)
I think there's a reasonable chance that the US will run into serious economic problems due to the trade imbalance with China, our excessive national debt, our poor savings, and our outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. Again, I think we have it coming, and I think it might help us to stop being so arrogant (and influential) as a nation.
China is not interested in economic competition with the United States. It wants to eliminate the U.S. from the world scene as a viable competitor.
The rest of your post was reasonable, if not a bit one-sided. But this part is a bit off the farm. The US is the largest buyer of Chinese products. If China eliminated the US as a competitor, we wouldn't have enough money to buy their stuff. It's interesting to compare economic competitive strategies with strategies for biological viruses -- the best strategy is not to kill the host.
When I worked at CompUSA in 1994, ECS motherboards were the best we had available. All the techs used them in our own PCs.
I think perhaps the reason you think ECS is crap is that you're dealing with OEM pieces. We had the same thing when we switched to Acer back in the day. (Before that, we used various brands, including ECS.) If you bought Acer systems, they'd have a failure rate of maybe 5%. But the Acer-made OEM boards in the CompUSA-branded systems failed like 15-20% of the time. It was clear that they had much more stringient QA of their own stuff than the un-branded OEM junk.
If you work hard enough and earn enough to be concerned with the death tax, then it's YOUR money. You earned it.
And therein lies the rub. You earned the money. Most likely that was a good thing -- you worked hard, leaving the world a better place than you found it (in terms of producing material goods and services). If your children inherit a large sum of money, then they will not have to contribute to society in that same way.
That a person should be able to decide where their money goes after they die is an arbitrary social construct. We could just as easily come up with a construct that says that money is "owned" by the government, and has to be returned to them upon death. Or that everything goes to the eldest male child.
There's also the concern about concentrating wealth and power along family lines. (Other posts in this thread go into that in more detail.) This is one of the things that the founders of the USA rebelled against. It's actually partially enshrined in our Constitution. (Article I, Section 9 says that there shall be no nobility. Article III, Section 2 prohibits punishing one's family for crimes they commit.)
And finally, there's the argument that the rich gain the most from having a stable government. (This has also been well-covered in sibling threads.) So having a "wealth tax", or at least a graduated tax with the wealthy paying a higher percentage, makes a lot of sense. But wealthy folks (especially first-generation, who have earned their own wealth) also contribute a lot of capital to help our economy grow. So think of the estate tax as a deferment of the "wealth tax", in order to allow the capital to be used most effectively.
So, there seem to be at least 3 or 4 good reasons to have an estate tax. And I've only seen one good reason to not have it. Which boils down to "it's my money". But that same reason applies to any tax. And it's actually less true in this case, because the real argument here is more like "it was my daddy's money".
main.css might look like this:
green.css might look like this:
red.css might look like this:
In my HTML, I can specify one of those as the default 'skin', and the other as an alternative:
Firefox users can then select between those 2 page styles from the View menu. For bonus points, I add a JavaScript style-switcher to allow other browsers to switch using some links on the page. Using cookies, I can remember which color they chose last and make that the default -- either in JavaScript, or on the server side.
You're thinking of Linuxgruven.
More importantly, a patent only protects the idea for 20 years. So if it were true, the patent would have expired, and plenty of companies would be able to implement it. (Yes, there's the issue of trade secrets required to make it work optimally, but the patent should be enough to get most of the efficiency, if it truly is earth-shattering.)
Here's my car. No back seat. But try telling me that it won't help me get laid. ;)
They probably didn't have a good continuously variable transmission to work with back then either. A CVT is another good way to keep the RPMs within the most efficient range all the time.
Do you think HTML 5 (from the WHAT WG) will have a better chance of being accepted by the browser vendors than XHTML 2.0 or whatever else comes from the W3C? (I suppose being accepted by the dominant IE would be the most important.) As a more general question, how can we best create new standards that allow backward and forward compatibility? It seems that current browsers handle current HTML versions as special cases, by looking at the HTML version string. It seems that this would break the ability for these browsers to treat HTML 5 as if it were HTML 4.
Shouldn't it be the boy who is suing MySpace? He's the one who thought he was dating a 17-year-old girl, right?
The 200 mm wafer size gives a good indication of what generation of technology it was made with. The latest fabs use 300 mm wafers; 200 mm is the most common in use today. (Another indication that you're probably right that it was meaningless to include. But they also confused 2 GHz RF with 2 GHz CPU speeds.) As you suggest, the only real advantage of the wafer size is how many chips you can make at one time.