The reason to lobby for "orphaned works" legislation instead of fixing copyright terms is the fact that Big Media will never allow copyright terms to be shortened. But - being really easy to locate and immortal - they have nothing to fear from orphaned works exceptions, so that's an opening for others to chip away at the copyright monopoly.
It's a myth (based on unreliable memory) that people were more honest Back In My Day. See: Richard Nixon. Frank Abagnale. Charles Ponzi. Piltdown Man. P.T. Barnum.
Skipping college and starting your own blockbuster company is an option, much like winning the lottery is an option, or being born with millionaire parents is an option.
From what I've heard, vending machine manufacturers and operators hate dollar bills. Those scanners are easily faked out, but also have a high false-negative rate, get jammed with damaged bills, frustrate customers whose bills aren't new enough, etc. Vendors only started adding them to machines because they didn't want people to have to feed half a dozen (or more) coins into a machine to get a Pepsi.
A one-time conversion to accept $5 and $1 coins would result in much less hassle for the vending machine folks, because coin-counting devices are fairly difficult to fake out (you can't produce counterfeit metal quarters with a computer and inkjet printer) and much more reliable.
You have this backward. €1 and €2 are coins because of inflation, not the other way around. You shouldn't think twice about spending €1 on something because it isn't much money.
Nearly every other economy with a unit of money roughly comparable to the US dollar has replaced their corresponding banknote with a coin. Canadian dollar. Australian dollar. United Kingdom pound. Brazilian real. New Zealand dollar. The Whole Freakin' EuroZone's euro. Swiss Franc. Countries whose money is off by a major factor have coins with roughly the value of the US dollar (e.g. Japanese yen, Russian rubles). Do you think maybe they're onto something?
US money is way overdue for an overhaul. It's time to drop the penny and the nickel, and start rounding prices to the nearest 1/10 of a dollar, which would keep the math simple. Stop printing disposable bank notes worth less than $10, and replace them with durable coins.
I'm sure that part of the psychological resistance to this comes down to two words: Washington and Lincoln. They're the two most popular presidents, and they're on three out of the four items we need to discontinue. So reassign them. Put George on the new $1 coin, and Abe on the new $5 coin. Since George is already on the quarter, move Jefferson there (from the nickel). Problem solved.
Don't tar "art critics" with the brush you use on Camille Paglia. I've been ignoring her as a bit of a sociological nutcase since the 1990s. She styles herself as kind of feminist libertarian, but as Gloria Steinem put it, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic."
In states with "at will" employment, you don't even need to go to that much trouble. The older a employee is, the more care needs to be taken to establish a paper trail justification (just in case), but for a non-contracted 39-year-old ("too young" to be a victim according to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act), an employer can just perp-walk them out of the building, with no reason given. (Guess how I know this.)
I'm not sure if this is what he meant, but one can be an atheist who is zealous about something non-theistic, such as an atheist libertarian zealot, an atheist communist zealot, an atheist animal-rights zealot, or an atheist law-and-order zealot. Those can be more dangerous than your garden variety moderate theist.
Bookstores are trying to maintain their relevance by becoming coffeeshops that sell books. The idea is to make the store a destination in its own right, rather than just the means to get a chunk of entertainment. At a bookstore you can sample the offerings before picking one out (not possible with DVD-by-mail, and possible – but not really done well – by streaming services), so maybe set up DVD players with headphones, or (shhhh) rip the DVDs and let the customers preview them on kiosks in the store. Put together displays that draw on the staff's expertise (e.g. favorite dystopic sci-fi films, throw in a free second DVD that makes for a good double feature) rather than homogenized wisdom-of-the-crowd correlations or dubious one-random-idiot's-faves lists that you find on web sites. A DVD rental store can never compete with the stock of the latest blockbusters or the depth of the library that Netflix or Amazon has; don't even make that a goal. To work, you need to focus on the "service" side of the business; every person on the floor needs to be a seasoned cinephile, not short-term minimum-wage high school kids. Set up a mini "home theater" and have regular "movie night" events for small groups of people to watch old films with fellow fans of the films. (This would probably require paying performance-rights fees to the studios.) This is all stop-gap stuff, of course. This store is not going to exist to be passed down to the kids as the family business. But it might keep the doors open and the lights on for a while longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Quickly recovers leaving victims in its wake. You seem to want to leave that part out too.
Anyone who thinks that this quantum-mechanics stock market is a sane basis for our economy... is not.
Two words: caching and batching. Interactivity is too much like dealing with people anyway. :)
I'd go, but only if they offered reliable broadband internet access. (I'll put up with the latency as one of those facts-of-physics thangs.)
The reason to lobby for "orphaned works" legislation instead of fixing copyright terms is the fact that Big Media will never allow copyright terms to be shortened. But - being really easy to locate and immortal - they have nothing to fear from orphaned works exceptions, so that's an opening for others to chip away at the copyright monopoly.
It's a myth (based on unreliable memory) that people were more honest Back In My Day.
See: Richard Nixon. Frank Abagnale. Charles Ponzi. Piltdown Man. P.T. Barnum.
You have roughly the same chance* of successfully choosing any one of these.
*none, or insignificantly higher
Skipping college and starting your own blockbuster company is an option, much like winning the lottery is an option, or being born with millionaire parents is an option.
From what I've heard, vending machine manufacturers and operators hate dollar bills. Those scanners are easily faked out, but also have a high false-negative rate, get jammed with damaged bills, frustrate customers whose bills aren't new enough, etc. Vendors only started adding them to machines because they didn't want people to have to feed half a dozen (or more) coins into a machine to get a Pepsi.
A one-time conversion to accept $5 and $1 coins would result in much less hassle for the vending machine folks, because coin-counting devices are fairly difficult to fake out (you can't produce counterfeit metal quarters with a computer and inkjet printer) and much more reliable.
"The right way to do it is to just do it: issue the coins and stop issuing dollar bills."
Now you're being silly. Just because it's worked for every other country that's tried it doesn't mean it will work for the US. We're exceptional!
You might feel differently if coins were worth something.
You have this backward. €1 and €2 are coins because of inflation, not the other way around. You shouldn't think twice about spending €1 on something because it isn't much money.
Nearly every other economy with a unit of money roughly comparable to the US dollar has replaced their corresponding banknote with a coin. Canadian dollar. Australian dollar. United Kingdom pound. Brazilian real. New Zealand dollar. The Whole Freakin' EuroZone's euro. Swiss Franc. Countries whose money is off by a major factor have coins with roughly the value of the US dollar (e.g. Japanese yen, Russian rubles). Do you think maybe they're onto something?
US money is way overdue for an overhaul. It's time to drop the penny and the nickel, and start rounding prices to the nearest 1/10 of a dollar, which would keep the math simple. Stop printing disposable bank notes worth less than $10, and replace them with durable coins.
I'm sure that part of the psychological resistance to this comes down to two words: Washington and Lincoln. They're the two most popular presidents, and they're on three out of the four items we need to discontinue. So reassign them. Put George on the new $1 coin, and Abe on the new $5 coin. Since George is already on the quarter, move Jefferson there (from the nickel). Problem solved.
That will just bump the tips up to higher denominations.
Don't tar "art critics" with the brush you use on Camille Paglia. I've been ignoring her as a bit of a sociological nutcase since the 1990s. She styles herself as kind of feminist libertarian, but as Gloria Steinem put it, "Her calling herself a feminist is sort of like a Nazi saying they're not anti-Semitic."
You can also fake "non-performance" and fire them for that, which was the point you seemed to not realize was also possible.
In states with "at will" employment, you don't even need to go to that much trouble. The older a employee is, the more care needs to be taken to establish a paper trail justification (just in case), but for a non-contracted 39-year-old ("too young" to be a victim according to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act), an employer can just perp-walk them out of the building, with no reason given. (Guess how I know this.)
Apparently ST:TOS reruns aren't quite as ubiquitous as they used to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
You also get to shoot and blow things up a lot more in video games, not just when there's a confirmed Bad Guy on the screen once in a while.
Modded down... awwww did some libertarian zealot get his widdle feelings hurt?
I'm not sure if this is what he meant, but one can be an atheist who is zealous about something non-theistic, such as an atheist libertarian zealot, an atheist communist zealot, an atheist animal-rights zealot, or an atheist law-and-order zealot. Those can be more dangerous than your garden variety moderate theist.
While the technology might have the same basis as these cloaking efforts, this should more properly be described as "shields".
"Autonomy"? I thought we were buying "Anonymous"!
It's her Aunt Eliza.
I'm not 12 years old, nor do I have the emotional and intellectual development of a 12-year-old.
Bookstores are trying to maintain their relevance by becoming coffeeshops that sell books. The idea is to make the store a destination in its own right, rather than just the means to get a chunk of entertainment. At a bookstore you can sample the offerings before picking one out (not possible with DVD-by-mail, and possible – but not really done well – by streaming services), so maybe set up DVD players with headphones, or (shhhh) rip the DVDs and let the customers preview them on kiosks in the store. Put together displays that draw on the staff's expertise (e.g. favorite dystopic sci-fi films, throw in a free second DVD that makes for a good double feature) rather than homogenized wisdom-of-the-crowd correlations or dubious one-random-idiot's-faves lists that you find on web sites. A DVD rental store can never compete with the stock of the latest blockbusters or the depth of the library that Netflix or Amazon has; don't even make that a goal. To work, you need to focus on the "service" side of the business; every person on the floor needs to be a seasoned cinephile, not short-term minimum-wage high school kids. Set up a mini "home theater" and have regular "movie night" events for small groups of people to watch old films with fellow fans of the films. (This would probably require paying performance-rights fees to the studios.) This is all stop-gap stuff, of course. This store is not going to exist to be passed down to the kids as the family business. But it might keep the doors open and the lights on for a while longer.