Yeah, tromping over the top of the peasants and leaving them to face the army approaching from the other direction...:(
I have noticed that the lawsuits (that I've heard of, anyway) have neatly managed to avoid targeting anyone with the resources to realistically fight it.
It struck me as partly an attempt to shift the "blame" to technology companies -- make it THEIR problem whether fair use exists or not, and if it doesn't, oh well!
As I said above, rather like two superpowers' armies duking it out, and in the process killing all the civilians.
The closest I can think of is in dogs, where there exists "full" registration vs "limited" registration:
With full registration, you can breed the dog (ie. "create copies") and register its offspring (effectively "acquire legal title"). If you buy a dog with full registration, you have purchased this "right to copy" along with the original dog itself.
With limited registration, you can breed the dog, but you cannot register its offspring; any such offspring are effectively "bootlegged" (ie. there is no "legal title" or "right to copy").
There is usually a significant difference in purchase price between full and limited reg'n, so you do indeed "pay for the right to copy" when you buy a dog with full registration.
BTW this is subject to abuse much as is copyright fair use, thus: rather than using limited registration *as it was intended*, which was for quality control (by removing substandard specimens from the gene pool), most breeders use it to artificially restrict competition by preventing others from breeding dogs (or at least from breeding dogs with full market value).
Copyright in its original meaning is *not* the exclusive right to copy, but rather, the exclusive right to PUBLISH (ie. to make public**).
If you don't PUBLISH your works, the copyright office will NOT issue a copyright. You can only copyright something that is intended for PUBLICATION; that is, *intended* to be made available to OTHERS.*
This is precisely why companies that hoard "unprofitable" works, but refuse to PUBLISH them, should have those copyrights rescinded, and said works released to the public domain.
* The more-recent addendum that anything you create is automatically copyrighted, whether it's been published or not, has somewhat undermined the original concept, which as you point out, was to enrich the PUBLIC domain.
** "Publish" has the same root and fundamental meaning as "public". Think of "publish" as the verb form of "public", and you'll have its true meaning, as it was understood by those who invented the concept of "copyright" in the first place.
To put it into slashdot-speak, copyright in its original form was meant to work rather like the GPL, with the addition of a short period where only the creator/publisher could profit from the work.
Actually, most of the low-density coal (less efficient to burn, but far more economical to mine) is where it can be strip-mined, and the natural soil is poor or barren (or even entirely absent) to begin with. Ever been to the coal-producing areas of eastern Montana or NE Wyoming? Not much there but sagebrush and rocks. It's barely fit for grazing sheep; you certainly can't grow crops there.
If you're careful about "archiving" whatever topsoil there was, strip-mined land can be returned to productivity, or even improved, as sometimes the resulting sink catches water and improves the water table over time, and tends to retain whatever soil drifts in on the wind, so there is a net gain in soil fertility.
Uranium mining is a fairly "dirty" process that produces a lot of secondary contamination, since there tend to be a variety of toxic/radioactive components in the same stretch of rocks.
There are already chunks of the SoCal desert, where uranium is found/mined, that are regarded as unfit for human use because of radioactivity. (That was why they put Edwards AFB out here in the first place -- it could do no harm to ground already unfit for habitation. You oughta see the weird mutations in the local carrion beetles.)
Side note: I don't object to nuclear power in principle, but I think the special interests/long-term risks balance isn't a net positive.
While these ideas all sound good on the surface, you still need a mailto:link in the *source*, if you expect people to be able to click on it. And I doubt spambots are scraping the *rendered* page.
As to copy and paste, remember that 1) many people (especially newer users) have no idea they can do this, and 2) text that's split among different table cells usually does not copy as a single unit, and sometimes refuses to copy at all.
BTW, my main email addy has been plastered all over my sites for 8 years now, and collects very little spam that the ISP's filter can't chuck out. I do sometimes wonder if that's because I use the form "mailto:me@example.com?Subject=spam" -- that can't be all that difficult to parse, so perhaps the form makes it look like a spamtrap.
I don't know what it says now, but Yahoo's broadband agreement used to explicitly state that you could share your connection with up to 10 other users, so long as you did not SELL it.
For me, the new stadiums have no soul. I'd rather see a game (whether live or on TV) in a beat-up old stadium that feels like home, and is part of my team's character, than in some state of the art stadium that feels like "generic commercial team".
And I agree about the salary cap -- it's one thing for a bigger market to attract more money overall, that's just economic reality. But the salary inequity is so great that the smaller markets can't compete with their peer teams on anything like an equal footing. Especially since we don't have lifetime-with-one-team players anymore.
"I'm the most loyal player money can buy." -- Don Sutton
If anything, mathematicians, chemists, engineers, programmers, and the whole gamut of technical jobs are required to communicate MORE clearly than, say, grammarians. If a grammarian writes innaccuracies or even outright gibberish, the worst that happens is that no one understands what they meant. But if a mathematician, chemist, engineer, or programmer doesn't communicate clearly and accurately, your missile hits the wrong city, its fuel is unstable and may explode on the pad, the launchpad breaks up from a minor earthquake, and the control system gets hacked because of buffer overflows. Extreme examples, but you get what I mean.
Even as a non-programmer, I've seen application bugs that derived from a coder's inability to spell a variable name the same way twice. Yet sloppy spelling and grammar seem to be perfectly okay with them!
The habits of precise writing (spelling, grammar, and content) serve you well not just in writing, but in everything you do. And it's fine to get it "just good enough" in a venue that doesn't matter, like casual text messaging (or forum posting:) But in the Real World, accuracy counts. And if you don't think so, I don't want you designing the programs I run on my computer, the car I drive, the chemicals I put on my lawn...
School isn't just a lot of drivel you can blow off if you feel the urge. It's partly a practice run for the Real World, and should be handled as such. If you can't be bothered to get it right in practice, why should the Real World trust you to get it right??
Actually, no. TFA has an example, and it is indeed invisible to my preferred braindead browser that don't know no CSS. It's just blank space on the page, that I'd never know was anything unusual if TFA hadn't pointed it out. Rather like commented code.
Unless readers for the blind start scraping HTML source instead of visible text, it shouldn't be an issue.
I did RTFA, and it mentioned problems with javascript and why they discarded that notion.
TFA page has an example of the "hidden form", and it is indeed invisible -- so one less thing to confuse the user. Confused users were part of the issue they wished to resolve, so...
I suppose spambots will evolve to check for how a form is set up, but meanwhile, I like this idea much better than the alternatives.
I've only seen one election where both major-party candidates were such slime that I could not bring myself to vote for either one (and the minor-party candidates weren't anyone I considered competent, so no one there I cared to vote for either). That was one of the very few times I've withheld my vote. Having to do so (because I could not ethically support any of them for ANY reason) was even more disappointing because one of the slimes had, through dishonest tactics, defeated a very GOOD candidate in the primaries.
But as you say, usually there is SOME point that makes one candidate more appealing than the other, so it's not really "lesser of two evils" but rather, "which one has more good ideas than bad ideas?"
"...it does prohibit them from drawing on their personal knowledge without citing their sources."
Um... what about when *I* am the source, and I, or my own works, are the only cites available?
ISTM that while this policy is geared toward screening out non-peer-reviewed sources, it could also serve to reinforce academic censorship, which I think most folk here would agree *does* sometimes happen.
A solution might be a sub-wiki, where people can discourse (per other Wiki standards) about their own fields of expertise, without needing to cite references that may not exist, no matter how expert they are in their fields. By being segregated, it would avoid "contaminating" the "citeable" parts of the Wiki.
===
Interviewer: Who is your authority for that statement?
One of my college majors was microbiology (the other was biochemistry)... even so, one just doesn't think of fungus as biomassive. But as you say, when anything dies, it usually gets processed/degraded through fungus and microbes. And all that carbon has to go *somewhere*... one might even speculate that the effective microbial mass equals that of plants and animals, just to keep the balance. (Side note: fecal matter is about 75% bacteria.)
So... if CO2 levels are the cause of global warming, what we really should be researching is globally-effective immortality, so we'll stop releasing all that used carbon back into the environment.;)
Greenland was more-exposed during the Medieval warm period; it follows that good chunks of the polar ice cap melted as well.
And there have been other fluctuations as ice ages came and went... if the current melt is so deadly, why didn't these much larger changes kill 'em off in some prior millennium??
Interesting chart. I also note that over the long haul, CO2 levels only vaguely follow temp (and sometimes not at all). One has to wonder if CO2 levels are more related to the type and quantity of biomass, and of volcanic/tectonic activity, than to the climate/temps as such.
It also appears that relative to said long haul, CO2 levels are presently at an all-time low.
This isn't the first time the polar ice caps have experienced significant melting. So... why didn't the polar bears become extinct the last time, or the time before that?? It's not like they evolved in the few hundred years since the last major warm period!
I hadn't heard this concept before, but it's very interesting, and (knowing how underhanded such agendas can be) sounds all too plausible. Of course American oil production was largely regulated out of business decades ago, and one has to wonder about that as well...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, tromping over the top of the peasants and leaving them to face the army approaching from the other direction... :(
I have noticed that the lawsuits (that I've heard of, anyway) have neatly managed to avoid targeting anyone with the resources to realistically fight it.
It struck me as partly an attempt to shift the "blame" to technology companies -- make it THEIR problem whether fair use exists or not, and if it doesn't, oh well!
As I said above, rather like two superpowers' armies duking it out, and in the process killing all the civilians.
One is reminded of two superpowers at war for control over a rich territory, in the process killing all the people living there.
[pro dog trainer/breeder hat]
The closest I can think of is in dogs, where there exists "full" registration vs "limited" registration:
With full registration, you can breed the dog (ie. "create copies") and register its offspring (effectively "acquire legal title"). If you buy a dog with full registration, you have purchased this "right to copy" along with the original dog itself.
With limited registration, you can breed the dog, but you cannot register its offspring; any such offspring are effectively "bootlegged" (ie. there is no "legal title" or "right to copy").
There is usually a significant difference in purchase price between full and limited reg'n, so you do indeed "pay for the right to copy" when you buy a dog with full registration.
BTW this is subject to abuse much as is copyright fair use, thus: rather than using limited registration *as it was intended*, which was for quality control (by removing substandard specimens from the gene pool), most breeders use it to artificially restrict competition by preventing others from breeding dogs (or at least from breeding dogs with full market value).
Copyright in its original meaning is *not* the exclusive right to copy, but rather, the exclusive right to PUBLISH (ie. to make public**).
If you don't PUBLISH your works, the copyright office will NOT issue a copyright. You can only copyright something that is intended for PUBLICATION; that is, *intended* to be made available to OTHERS.*
This is precisely why companies that hoard "unprofitable" works, but refuse to PUBLISH them, should have those copyrights rescinded, and said works released to the public domain.
* The more-recent addendum that anything you create is automatically copyrighted, whether it's been published or not, has somewhat undermined the original concept, which as you point out, was to enrich the PUBLIC domain.
** "Publish" has the same root and fundamental meaning as "public". Think of "publish" as the verb form of "public", and you'll have its true meaning, as it was understood by those who invented the concept of "copyright" in the first place.
To put it into slashdot-speak, copyright in its original form was meant to work rather like the GPL, with the addition of a short period where only the creator/publisher could profit from the work.
Actually, most of the low-density coal (less efficient to burn, but far more economical to mine) is where it can be strip-mined, and the natural soil is poor or barren (or even entirely absent) to begin with. Ever been to the coal-producing areas of eastern Montana or NE Wyoming? Not much there but sagebrush and rocks. It's barely fit for grazing sheep; you certainly can't grow crops there.
If you're careful about "archiving" whatever topsoil there was, strip-mined land can be returned to productivity, or even improved, as sometimes the resulting sink catches water and improves the water table over time, and tends to retain whatever soil drifts in on the wind, so there is a net gain in soil fertility.
The problems I see:
The supply of uranium is not infinite.
Uranium mining is a fairly "dirty" process that produces a lot of secondary contamination, since there tend to be a variety of toxic/radioactive components in the same stretch of rocks.
There are already chunks of the SoCal desert, where uranium is found/mined, that are regarded as unfit for human use because of radioactivity. (That was why they put Edwards AFB out here in the first place -- it could do no harm to ground already unfit for habitation. You oughta see the weird mutations in the local carrion beetles.)
Side note: I don't object to nuclear power in principle, but I think the special interests/long-term risks balance isn't a net positive.
While these ideas all sound good on the surface, you still need a mailto:link in the *source*, if you expect people to be able to click on it. And I doubt spambots are scraping the *rendered* page.
As to copy and paste, remember that 1) many people (especially newer users) have no idea they can do this, and 2) text that's split among different table cells usually does not copy as a single unit, and sometimes refuses to copy at all.
BTW, my main email addy has been plastered all over my sites for 8 years now, and collects very little spam that the ISP's filter can't chuck out. I do sometimes wonder if that's because I use the form "mailto:me@example.com?Subject=spam" -- that can't be all that difficult to parse, so perhaps the form makes it look like a spamtrap.
I don't know what it says now, but Yahoo's broadband agreement used to explicitly state that you could share your connection with up to 10 other users, so long as you did not SELL it.
For me, the new stadiums have no soul. I'd rather see a game (whether live or on TV) in a beat-up old stadium that feels like home, and is part of my team's character, than in some state of the art stadium that feels like "generic commercial team".
And I agree about the salary cap -- it's one thing for a bigger market to attract more money overall, that's just economic reality. But the salary inequity is so great that the smaller markets can't compete with their peer teams on anything like an equal footing. Especially since we don't have lifetime-with-one-team players anymore.
"I'm the most loyal player money can buy." -- Don Sutton
Thanks for the link to the noscript tool -- exactly what I needed!!
:)
I use Prefbar and it has a js on/off tick, but being able to configure it by site is better
I have the same complaint. You don't even get a naked search listing without javascript. Furthermore, the images part didn't work in Mozilla (v1.5).
And it's much slower than regular Google.
If anything, mathematicians, chemists, engineers, programmers, and the whole gamut of technical jobs are required to communicate MORE clearly than, say, grammarians. If a grammarian writes innaccuracies or even outright gibberish, the worst that happens is that no one understands what they meant. But if a mathematician, chemist, engineer, or programmer doesn't communicate clearly and accurately, your missile hits the wrong city, its fuel is unstable and may explode on the pad, the launchpad breaks up from a minor earthquake, and the control system gets hacked because of buffer overflows. Extreme examples, but you get what I mean.
:) But in the Real World, accuracy counts. And if you don't think so, I don't want you designing the programs I run on my computer, the car I drive, the chemicals I put on my lawn...
Even as a non-programmer, I've seen application bugs that derived from a coder's inability to spell a variable name the same way twice. Yet sloppy spelling and grammar seem to be perfectly okay with them!
The habits of precise writing (spelling, grammar, and content) serve you well not just in writing, but in everything you do. And it's fine to get it "just good enough" in a venue that doesn't matter, like casual text messaging (or forum posting
School isn't just a lot of drivel you can blow off if you feel the urge. It's partly a practice run for the Real World, and should be handled as such. If you can't be bothered to get it right in practice, why should the Real World trust you to get it right??
Actually, no. TFA has an example, and it is indeed invisible to my preferred braindead browser that don't know no CSS. It's just blank space on the page, that I'd never know was anything unusual if TFA hadn't pointed it out. Rather like commented code.
Unless readers for the blind start scraping HTML source instead of visible text, it shouldn't be an issue.
I did RTFA, and it mentioned problems with javascript and why they discarded that notion.
TFA page has an example of the "hidden form", and it is indeed invisible -- so one less thing to confuse the user. Confused users were part of the issue they wished to resolve, so...
I suppose spambots will evolve to check for how a form is set up, but meanwhile, I like this idea much better than the alternatives.
I've only seen one election where both major-party candidates were such slime that I could not bring myself to vote for either one (and the minor-party candidates weren't anyone I considered competent, so no one there I cared to vote for either). That was one of the very few times I've withheld my vote. Having to do so (because I could not ethically support any of them for ANY reason) was even more disappointing because one of the slimes had, through dishonest tactics, defeated a very GOOD candidate in the primaries.
But as you say, usually there is SOME point that makes one candidate more appealing than the other, so it's not really "lesser of two evils" but rather, "which one has more good ideas than bad ideas?"
I had a similar thought in a previous post -- segregate non-peer-reviewed content, but don't censor/delete it.
To expand on that, why not have a rating system where articles are ranked by whether they've passed peer-review muster or not, and/or to what degree??
For those that no one has time/interest to do, "unrated" is a perfectly valid rating.
From TFPolicy:
"...it does prohibit them from drawing on their personal knowledge without citing their sources."
Um... what about when *I* am the source, and I, or my own works, are the only cites available?
ISTM that while this policy is geared toward screening out non-peer-reviewed sources, it could also serve to reinforce academic censorship, which I think most folk here would agree *does* sometimes happen.
A solution might be a sub-wiki, where people can discourse (per other Wiki standards) about their own fields of expertise, without needing to cite references that may not exist, no matter how expert they are in their fields. By being segregated, it would avoid "contaminating" the "citeable" parts of the Wiki.
===
Interviewer: Who is your authority for that statement?
Arthur C. Clarke: *I* am.
===
Nah, just that if you wanna live a long time, you'd best pick Norwegian ancestors ;)
One of my college majors was microbiology (the other was biochemistry)... even so, one just doesn't think of fungus as biomassive. But as you say, when anything dies, it usually gets processed/degraded through fungus and microbes. And all that carbon has to go *somewhere*... one might even speculate that the effective microbial mass equals that of plants and animals, just to keep the balance. (Side note: fecal matter is about 75% bacteria.)
;)
So... if CO2 levels are the cause of global warming, what we really should be researching is globally-effective immortality, so we'll stop releasing all that used carbon back into the environment.
One could conclude that angeosperms have tied up the majority of the formerly-abundant CO2...
Didn't know that about fungus; one doesn't usually think of it as being that significant!
Greenland was more-exposed during the Medieval warm period; it follows that good chunks of the polar ice cap melted as well.
:)
And there have been other fluctuations as ice ages came and went... if the current melt is so deadly, why didn't these much larger changes kill 'em off in some prior millennium??
In short, I'm being anti-alarmist.
Interesting chart. I also note that over the long haul, CO2 levels only vaguely follow temp (and sometimes not at all). One has to wonder if CO2 levels are more related to the type and quantity of biomass, and of volcanic/tectonic activity, than to the climate/temps as such.
It also appears that relative to said long haul, CO2 levels are presently at an all-time low.
This isn't the first time the polar ice caps have experienced significant melting. So... why didn't the polar bears become extinct the last time, or the time before that?? It's not like they evolved in the few hundred years since the last major warm period!
I hadn't heard this concept before, but it's very interesting, and (knowing how underhanded such agendas can be) sounds all too plausible. Of course American oil production was largely regulated out of business decades ago, and one has to wonder about that as well...