Fat cat rich companies. What's more to say? Even if she finds the resources to defend herself, which is unlikely in such an unfair fight, other people will be more afraid to do similar things. Truth is no defense against a rich bully and a gang of lawyers.
Remember Bush's Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Actually, I first applied that to Poppy many years ago, but it goes double for Dubya.
That is an example of the abuse of copyright. That has come about because the publishing industry has been lobbying for decades to twist the laws that implement the originally good idea. Their motivation is not the public's interests, but merely to maximize their own profits. They have been sadly effective.
Amazingly enough, they can now sue you for derivative works--and even though Mickey Mouse was a derivative work in the first place.
Not sure what you mean by "direct formatting", which therefore becomes another example of confusion calling for training.
"Word Completion" wasn't obvious to me, and I'm a fairly experienced user going back to WordStar on 8-bit CP/M. I didn't know what key word to use when I searched the help--"word" is rather too common to be of much use there. I wound up wandering around in the Options tabs for a long time.
However, I still can't imagine the use for the feature. Presumably there must be some hot key to accept the current recommendation, but unless it's a single keystroke it will not be helpful. Combination keystrokes disrupt your typing too much.
I can vaguely imagine some sort of voice-linked interface. Perhaps it could show a list of candidates and I could jump the typing by saying "three" to pick the third current candidate. It would take some getting used to, and better voice recognition software would obviate the need.
That's actually touching on the real issue, but I couldn't find any place where it was addressed more directly in the following posts. BitTorrent and related technologies have broken the copyright system, and no number of draconian legal bandaids are going to fix it.
The central notion of copyright is that the act of making copies was difficult, and therefore served as a kind of chokepoint to control distribution and make sure someone got paid. The justification for legal sanction is more complex, though I like the American version, that encouraging creativity is beneficial for the society.
The copyright premise of difficult copying is totally broken. Staying with BitTorrent as an example, it was trival to distribute thousands of 75 MB copies of OpenOffice 2 in a few days. It could have been millions, and it would have made no difference from the usage perspective. When I got my download, it quickly maxed out my connection. More copies simply make it easier to do so.
Since the foundation has crumbled to sand, it doesn't matter what sort of reinforcements they try to use. Gonzales is just being a typical BushCo idiot and is trying to steer by looking backwards. We need to rethink the entire notion of copyright and how to compensate creativity, not focus on "new" ways to keep a dying publishing industry on life support.
I wonder if the videos include some of the things that should be unlearned. I suppose the general context would be Microsoft-based bad habits from their misfeatures. Unfortunately, I've been using Office junk for so long I've pretty much gotten used to the bizarreness.
However, what actually got me thinking along this line was a glaring misfeature in OO, the Word Completion feature in the Autocorrect section (from the Tools menu). I may not be understanding it correctly, but it appears that it is offering you the words that you've already typed. I find it incredibly annoying and unpredictable (since it is apparently learning dynamically, which includes both acquiring new words and new constraints as other new words create ambiguities). It took me several minutes of searching to find out how to disable it, but I see no easy way to make it useful... Therefore it just contributes to the general sluggishness and bloated feel of the program.
That only mentions it in passing, though in the headline part of the passing. The earlier story I saw on it was more amusing. They wanted to pretend it was "balanced" coverage, so they had to find a quote from someone who was in favor of paperless voting and sorry to see it going away. Guess who? They closed with a quote from some honcho from a paperless voting machine company. Balanced coverage in a pig's eye.
Just a coincidence, but something I wrote for a different forum today. Not perfectly on topic, but close enough (and I'm too busy to do more rewriting just now):
A lot of pundits are saying that this week's election shows something new or
a surprising change in voter trends. The only surprising thing is that
anyone still listens to such stupid pundits. All this election shows is that
money buys votes and that modern American politics is just a war of big
money. This is true in all of the elections, but the mayor's race in New
York City is the best example. The only interesting question there is why he
wanted to spend so much money to buy the relatively minor office of mayor.
I'd give the voters more credit if they had sold their votes for cash on the
barrelhead. That's illegal in these "enlightened" days, but it doesn't
change the big money reality. The political-power-buyers just have to
disguise it a bit now. As a candidate, it doesn't matter what your policies
are or what kind of person you are or anything else. The only thing that
matters is coming up with the scratch--millions of dollars. (It does matter
a little bit what kind of person you can pretend to be, but the Reagan/Dubya
problem is relatively minor compared to the overwhelming influence of big
money.)
Root cause? Easily manipulated voters. Show the voters enough of the
appropriate ads, usually slash-and-burn attack ads, and many of them will
even vote for a total incompetent and loser like George Dubya Bush.
Deeper root cause? "Free" advertiser-sponsored radio. An innovative (~70
years ago) economic model that ultimately led to rightwing talk radio.
Finest propaganda ever! It was also propagated into TV where it led to
increasingly mindless programs, and now it threatens the intellectual
foundations of the Internet, too. The funny part is that the policy-makers
of those days understood the risks and required that the public's interests
should be protected. Thus started an erosive process that culminated when
Reagan's handlers stripped off the last major protections. The negative
dynamic is pretty obvious, however. Advertisers do not want well-educated
and thoughtful citizens. They want easily manipulated suckers. That's how
you get the most bang for your advertising buck--and the bucks have finally
won out. Intelligent voting has to be reality-based, but advertising is
NOT about the truth.
In conclusion, nothing matters except for the money. Good for a 20% margin
in NYC! The only problem in New Jersey was that the Republican couldn't
afford to run the ex-wife-attacks-ex-hubby ad enough times. If you actually
believe (as I do) that freedom and democracy are good things and that they
confer competitive advantages on the societies that have the most of them,
then the sad conclusion is that America is doomed.
That's almost surely an urban legend. On the other hand, I heard that IBM had some similar problems with bad capacitors a few years ago. Affected a pretty large number of NetVista models, I think, though the absolute numbers of bad motherboards wasn't so bad... I don't know any of the details, but I have a fuzzy recollection that most of the bad capacitors were traced to a particular source in Taiwan.
Eh? I thought Cheney was the one who was insane? Didn't you get that memo?
But humorously (rather than "seriously"), you should go to the Daily Show site and watch the latest visit with McCain. (Hard to link externally from their site.) Jon Stewart is talking with McCain about the torture thing, and he suddenly pops up with "Is Dick Cheney insane?" McCain is just sitting there making strange faces for about 20 seconds. The interview was probably on Tuesday's show.
Just fishing for the amusing title, but in the (pretty large number of) posts I've looked at so far, no one has made the obvious observation that if the "terrorists" are actually concerned about being held some number of days, then they can just increase the level of encryption they use to make sure that it will take longer than that to decrypt their drives. There is no upper limit on the amount of encryption you use. For the police to claim that they need any fixed number of days is totally bogus, and the British police are just making excuses because they want to hold suspects for longer time periods. Heck, if having a HDD is the excuse for being held longer, then all the smart criminals will simply get rid of their computers. Of course that's on the theory that the amount of time the police are holding them has anything to do with whatever criminal action they might be planning.
In conclusion, I would guess that the stupid TV show called "24" must also be shown in Great Britain.
Real life is not like that. Before arresting someone, the police are supposed to already have some concrete and substantive basis for suspecting the person has committed a crime, or even stronger evidence that the person is really in the process of planning to commit a crime. The basis that "We think we'll find something AFTER we decrypt the HDD" is totally bogus. The reality here is they just want to quietly lean on the suspects for a longer time, and saying they need that much time because of HDD encryption is just a cheap--and stupid--excuse.
Having said that, I'm surprised the politicians weren't stupid enough to go along with the gag. That already puts them ahead of most American politicians. Can you try to imagine explaining HDD encryption to Dubya?
As a Sony shareholder, I sent them an angry email message, and got back nothing but a very feeble robotic reply. I sent back an even angrier response (but much shorter). There was an acknowledgment, but not even a robotic reply so far.
Durability problems with Sony products had discouraged me from buying their stuff, but I was really annoyed when the abandoned the CLIEs and left me orphaned. So now they're reducing the odds of buying from them close to zero and increasing the odds of my selling my stock. Seems like a pretty lousy way to run a company.
By the time they suck it up and apologize, no one is going to believe them. Anyway, I can't imagine anything they could do to make the apology sincere, short of going out of business.
The bad memories it brings back are of Germany and Japan in the 1930s. The "authorities" were increasingly eager to crack down on disobedient and insolent youths.
Of course I think the real problem is that young people tend to be very idealistic, and their natural idealism often conflicts with the very hardened realism of the "authorities". Dick Cheney and the following nine Senators leap to mind:
Wayne Allard, Colorado
Kit Bond, Missouri
Tom Coburn, Oklahoma
Thad Cochran, Mississippi
John Cornyn, Texas
James Inhofe, Oklahoma
Pat Roberts, Kansas
Jeff Sessions, Alabama
Ted Stevens, Alaska
I wonder if any students will get in trouble if they try to organize any letter-writing campaigns against these characters. These are the nine who voted against McCain's anti-torture amendment. It was 91-9 against torture in America's name. (I may not be so young, but I'm still idealistic enough to be disgusted by these people.)
That's the main reason I'm very seriously thinking about moving to anything else. I don't really like Apple, but it seems to be the best option, and at least they don't start by calling me, the customer, a probable thief.
Not intended as a flame, but I just don't regard Linux as mature enough on the desktop for me to go that route. I've spent a lot of time on various UNIX environments over the years, and they usually consume too much overhead for hacking, and these days I just want to get my work done.
These guys (/. editors) are supposed to be paid to do this? Really hard to believe, given that kind of dumb introduction.
On the other hand, in scanning the thread I'm unable to find any note of the obvious idiocy. I quote from the/. thread introduction above: "Of course, it'd probably be best if fundmentalists actually talked to, say, the rabbis who wrote the whole thing down." Mighty OLD rabbis they'd be--except for the other detail that I'm pretty sure they didn't even have rabbis in those days.
I think it's another proof of the bogosity of ID that it provokes discussions like this one, even allowing for the involvement of the Pope.
"I don't know who he is, Sarge, but his driver is the Pope!"
Was that supposed to be a joke? If so, it wasn't funny. It's just a very tired old lie. If you think it was a joke, you should include an emoticon signifying "This is a joke, but I'm not a moron and I know it isn't funny." In addition, you should register for a sense of humor transplant.
If it wasn't a joke, then you mush be a mindless Bushevik of some stripe, and I have a favor to ask of you. Please designate me as your foe. That will make it much more convenient to ignore your futher blatherings. If you wish to make it mutual, then you can adjust your own settings to reduce the visibility of your foes.
Yes, but not for that silly non-reason. Dubya has been the most anti-scientific president in a long time. Probably of all of them, but certainly the greatest enemy of science of any president I know about. He's only giving these cheap awards as another cheap political move to pretend he supports science while he continues to cut the budget for real research and real education and push for pseudo-science like "intelligent design".
Rejecting these medals would at least blow the cheap gesture back in his face, and it's barely possible the embarrassment would do some good. Perhaps Dubya can borrow a few billion more from the Chinese to support some real science?
I think you are mostly being contentious for the sake of contention, and your final comment is sufficient evidence. Either that, or your a rather poor editor. I was not asserting the possibility of stopping time exists, and for you to start a new argument about what time would be best to stop is irrelevant at best, but more likely some sort of Sophism.
By the way, I am actually a professional editor, and most of my work is research papers coming from a rather large laboratory. Getting off topic, but I think editing itself is a dying art--and most of the great editors have already died or retired. The main thing the Internet needs is more editing, but the trend is clearly the other way.
Not sure if you're talking about me as the great-grandparent poster, but my original algorithm will usually require more than 16 tosses. Essentially it generates a string of hexidecimal digits and discards all A-F values. You don't have to determine those A-F values completely to know that you're going to discard them, so that saves some tosses. This is still a simplistic heuristic, because you just reset completely after tossing a digit. Not proven, but I have an intuition that any attempt at a running restart would be biased in some direction, whereas it is IOtTMCO that four independent tosses will yield one random hexidecimal digit.
I can't tell if you are trolling, but I can't imagine what basis you think 14 years is reasonable, even if we just try to restrict it to copyright. Around 200 years ago it might have seemed like a reasonable time for amortization of the author's time, but modern word processing software and publication directly from the files have completely changed the time scales. It used to take years to create a book, but now they can do it in a few months. If it took 5 years to produce a book, then 14 years does sound reasonable, but 5 months? It certainly wasn't the intention of copyright to encourage authors to sit around for a decade between books.
When we start considering patents, the situation is much worse. The pace of innovation in most fields is very fast, and event the current term of patents is often sufficient to stifle progress rather than to encourage it.
Remember that the goal was to encourage ongoing creativity by authors and inventors, not simply to make publishers and corporate research labs filthy rich.
Most of my experimental attempts have involved email, and there the crucial problem is that my complicated file structure has always been destroyed in the process. It is possible that a non-folder-based solution along the lines of Gmail would solve that problem, but it would need to have highly reliable import capabilities. Also, I have strong reservations about importing my personal email to some other server, even Google's with their quasi-promise to do no evil. Not exactly binding in a court of law, where possession is nine points.
You are talking about something called "first sale" that gives you certain legal rights, such as selling or loaning the book. That is also defined legally, and the notion is under attack by the publishers. So far Congress has resisted some of the efforts, but the publishers are still in the market to buy the required politicians.
If Microsoft wants it, we already know it favors big companies and a certain monopoly over all else. What we really need a simple recognition of the legal principle that your personal data belongs to you--and should be stored on your own equipment and subject to your Fifth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. "Possession is nine points of the law."
Too busy to grab the links just now, and the thread will be old and dead before I have time to do so, but several of my recent posts have been on this topic. You can search for them (assuming you have the time and interest).
A link to the lengthy blog entry and an explanation of the salient points would have been sufficient. Because you used the material in a way which I regard as rather rude, I only glanced at it, and will only make two brief comments.
First, Google's long-term goal is rather similar to what was mentioned early in the post. Recently Google even announced a time frame for completing the project. Around 300 years, if I remember correctly.
Second, I concur that copyright law has been abused and now extends in areas completely outside of the original intention of the idea. This is actually the natural result of successful and long-term lobbying efforts by publishers, who naturally had the most to gain from twisting and distorting the copyright system in this way. However, I doubt any simple cure is possible. I saw 14 years mentioned frequently, but that's not a holy number or anything. I think the actual "best" solution would need to be some sort of equation for each category of work, with the economic benefit to creators balanced against the time-related value and the "social need" to devalue the old in order to motivate the creation of new material. (The publishers have never had more than a parasitical role, if you ask me. They have mostly succeeded only in maximizing their own incomes, not the creators.)
Re:Speaking as the author of a book
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
I think you are speaking without sufficient knowledge. Google is agreeing to compensate the publishers (based on a "percentage of profits", as you put it), and is also agreeing to allow authors and publishers to opt out. The last discussion I read about it even said that Google was offering to exclude advertising from this project so that they would not be making any direct profits.
The people who are most upset by the coming changes are the ones who stand to lose the most, which is clearly the publishers in this case. They have an existing business model which has worked quite well, to the tune of billions of dollars. If it was at all possible, they would like to stop the clock at the moment of maximum cash flow. That is no more possible than running the clock backwards.
Re:Is it always in the interest of content provide
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Thank you for clarifying matters. You cannot read me mind, and you are lying to say that you can. Therefore you are a pseudo-intellectual Sophist and a liar. Apparently a stupid one, to boot.
Please do me one favor. Designate me as your foe, so I will more conveniently know to ignore any of your future posts that I stumble accross (though my settings make that rather unlikely once you have set the red dot in place).
Re:Is it always in the interest of content provide
on
Reining in Google
·
· Score: 1
You quoted one sentence of my post as a decontextualized and conveniently divided straw man. The bulk of your "reply" was already substantively covered in the parts of my post which you elected not to quote. Are you being intellectually dishonest? It certainly appears to be Sophism.
Or were you just using my post as a place to hang your ideas? In the later case, you should be more scrupulous about your misrepresentations or make it more clear that your post is *NOT* actually related to mine.
Alternately, if you simply could not understand what I wrote, then you could ask for clarification.
Since I feel you offered no new substance that was related to what I actually wrote, I now ignore your substance. I will only reiterate the main thrust of my post, which was that someone is going to use the Web to make more content available. If not now and not Google (probably Microsoft?) and not books, then later and someone else and other forms of content. The publishing industry as it exists now is doomed. Time does not run backwards, no matter how fervently the Busheviks pray for it to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember Bush's Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Actually, I first applied that to Poppy many years ago, but it goes double for Dubya.
Amazingly enough, they can now sue you for derivative works--and even though Mickey Mouse was a derivative work in the first place.
"Word Completion" wasn't obvious to me, and I'm a fairly experienced user going back to WordStar on 8-bit CP/M. I didn't know what key word to use when I searched the help--"word" is rather too common to be of much use there. I wound up wandering around in the Options tabs for a long time.
However, I still can't imagine the use for the feature. Presumably there must be some hot key to accept the current recommendation, but unless it's a single keystroke it will not be helpful. Combination keystrokes disrupt your typing too much.
I can vaguely imagine some sort of voice-linked interface. Perhaps it could show a list of candidates and I could jump the typing by saying "three" to pick the third current candidate. It would take some getting used to, and better voice recognition software would obviate the need.
The central notion of copyright is that the act of making copies was difficult, and therefore served as a kind of chokepoint to control distribution and make sure someone got paid. The justification for legal sanction is more complex, though I like the American version, that encouraging creativity is beneficial for the society.
The copyright premise of difficult copying is totally broken. Staying with BitTorrent as an example, it was trival to distribute thousands of 75 MB copies of OpenOffice 2 in a few days. It could have been millions, and it would have made no difference from the usage perspective. When I got my download, it quickly maxed out my connection. More copies simply make it easier to do so.
Since the foundation has crumbled to sand, it doesn't matter what sort of reinforcements they try to use. Gonzales is just being a typical BushCo idiot and is trying to steer by looking backwards. We need to rethink the entire notion of copyright and how to compensate creativity, not focus on "new" ways to keep a dying publishing industry on life support.
However, what actually got me thinking along this line was a glaring misfeature in OO, the Word Completion feature in the Autocorrect section (from the Tools menu). I may not be understanding it correctly, but it appears that it is offering you the words that you've already typed. I find it incredibly annoying and unpredictable (since it is apparently learning dynamically, which includes both acquiring new words and new constraints as other new words create ambiguities). It took me several minutes of searching to find out how to disable it, but I see no easy way to make it useful... Therefore it just contributes to the general sluggishness and bloated feel of the program.
http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issu e=11-11-05&storyID=22730
That only mentions it in passing, though in the headline part of the passing. The earlier story I saw on it was more amusing. They wanted to pretend it was "balanced" coverage, so they had to find a quote from someone who was in favor of paperless voting and sorry to see it going away. Guess who? They closed with a quote from some honcho from a paperless voting machine company. Balanced coverage in a pig's eye.
Just a coincidence, but something I wrote for a different forum today. Not perfectly on topic, but close enough (and I'm too busy to do more rewriting just now):
A lot of pundits are saying that this week's election shows something new or a surprising change in voter trends. The only surprising thing is that anyone still listens to such stupid pundits. All this election shows is that money buys votes and that modern American politics is just a war of big money. This is true in all of the elections, but the mayor's race in New York City is the best example. The only interesting question there is why he wanted to spend so much money to buy the relatively minor office of mayor.
I'd give the voters more credit if they had sold their votes for cash on the barrelhead. That's illegal in these "enlightened" days, but it doesn't change the big money reality. The political-power-buyers just have to disguise it a bit now. As a candidate, it doesn't matter what your policies are or what kind of person you are or anything else. The only thing that matters is coming up with the scratch--millions of dollars. (It does matter a little bit what kind of person you can pretend to be, but the Reagan/Dubya problem is relatively minor compared to the overwhelming influence of big money.)
Root cause? Easily manipulated voters. Show the voters enough of the appropriate ads, usually slash-and-burn attack ads, and many of them will even vote for a total incompetent and loser like George Dubya Bush.
Deeper root cause? "Free" advertiser-sponsored radio. An innovative (~70 years ago) economic model that ultimately led to rightwing talk radio. Finest propaganda ever! It was also propagated into TV where it led to increasingly mindless programs, and now it threatens the intellectual foundations of the Internet, too. The funny part is that the policy-makers of those days understood the risks and required that the public's interests should be protected. Thus started an erosive process that culminated when Reagan's handlers stripped off the last major protections. The negative dynamic is pretty obvious, however. Advertisers do not want well-educated and thoughtful citizens. They want easily manipulated suckers. That's how you get the most bang for your advertising buck--and the bucks have finally won out. Intelligent voting has to be reality-based, but advertising is NOT about the truth.
In conclusion, nothing matters except for the money. Good for a 20% margin in NYC! The only problem in New Jersey was that the Republican couldn't afford to run the ex-wife-attacks-ex-hubby ad enough times. If you actually believe (as I do) that freedom and democracy are good things and that they confer competitive advantages on the societies that have the most of them, then the sad conclusion is that America is doomed.
That's almost surely an urban legend. On the other hand, I heard that IBM had some similar problems with bad capacitors a few years ago. Affected a pretty large number of NetVista models, I think, though the absolute numbers of bad motherboards wasn't so bad... I don't know any of the details, but I have a fuzzy recollection that most of the bad capacitors were traced to a particular source in Taiwan.
But humorously (rather than "seriously"), you should go to the Daily Show site and watch the latest visit with McCain. (Hard to link externally from their site.) Jon Stewart is talking with McCain about the torture thing, and he suddenly pops up with "Is Dick Cheney insane?" McCain is just sitting there making strange faces for about 20 seconds. The interview was probably on Tuesday's show.
Just fishing for the amusing title, but in the (pretty large number of) posts I've looked at so far, no one has made the obvious observation that if the "terrorists" are actually concerned about being held some number of days, then they can just increase the level of encryption they use to make sure that it will take longer than that to decrypt their drives. There is no upper limit on the amount of encryption you use. For the police to claim that they need any fixed number of days is totally bogus, and the British police are just making excuses because they want to hold suspects for longer time periods. Heck, if having a HDD is the excuse for being held longer, then all the smart criminals will simply get rid of their computers. Of course that's on the theory that the amount of time the police are holding them has anything to do with whatever criminal action they might be planning.
In conclusion, I would guess that the stupid TV show called "24" must also be shown in Great Britain.
Real life is not like that. Before arresting someone, the police are supposed to already have some concrete and substantive basis for suspecting the person has committed a crime, or even stronger evidence that the person is really in the process of planning to commit a crime. The basis that "We think we'll find something AFTER we decrypt the HDD" is totally bogus. The reality here is they just want to quietly lean on the suspects for a longer time, and saying they need that much time because of HDD encryption is just a cheap--and stupid--excuse.
Having said that, I'm surprised the politicians weren't stupid enough to go along with the gag. That already puts them ahead of most American politicians. Can you try to imagine explaining HDD encryption to Dubya?
Durability problems with Sony products had discouraged me from buying their stuff, but I was really annoyed when the abandoned the CLIEs and left me orphaned. So now they're reducing the odds of buying from them close to zero and increasing the odds of my selling my stock. Seems like a pretty lousy way to run a company.
By the time they suck it up and apologize, no one is going to believe them. Anyway, I can't imagine anything they could do to make the apology sincere, short of going out of business.
Of course I think the real problem is that young people tend to be very idealistic, and their natural idealism often conflicts with the very hardened realism of the "authorities". Dick Cheney and the following nine Senators leap to mind:
I wonder if any students will get in trouble if they try to organize any letter-writing campaigns against these characters. These are the nine who voted against McCain's anti-torture amendment. It was 91-9 against torture in America's name. (I may not be so young, but I'm still idealistic enough to be disgusted by these people.)
Not intended as a flame, but I just don't regard Linux as mature enough on the desktop for me to go that route. I've spent a lot of time on various UNIX environments over the years, and they usually consume too much overhead for hacking, and these days I just want to get my work done.
On the other hand, in scanning the thread I'm unable to find any note of the obvious idiocy. I quote from the /. thread introduction above: "Of course, it'd probably be best if fundmentalists actually talked to, say, the rabbis who wrote the whole thing down." Mighty OLD rabbis they'd be--except for the other detail that I'm pretty sure they didn't even have rabbis in those days.
I think it's another proof of the bogosity of ID that it provokes discussions like this one, even allowing for the involvement of the Pope.
"I don't know who he is, Sarge, but his driver is the Pope!"
If it wasn't a joke, then you mush be a mindless Bushevik of some stripe, and I have a favor to ask of you. Please designate me as your foe. That will make it much more convenient to ignore your futher blatherings. If you wish to make it mutual, then you can adjust your own settings to reduce the visibility of your foes.
Rejecting these medals would at least blow the cheap gesture back in his face, and it's barely possible the embarrassment would do some good. Perhaps Dubya can borrow a few billion more from the Chinese to support some real science?
That's a joke, son. Laugh.
By the way, I am actually a professional editor, and most of my work is research papers coming from a rather large laboratory. Getting off topic, but I think editing itself is a dying art--and most of the great editors have already died or retired. The main thing the Internet needs is more editing, but the trend is clearly the other way.
Not sure if you're talking about me as the great-grandparent poster, but my original algorithm will usually require more than 16 tosses. Essentially it generates a string of hexidecimal digits and discards all A-F values. You don't have to determine those A-F values completely to know that you're going to discard them, so that saves some tosses. This is still a simplistic heuristic, because you just reset completely after tossing a digit. Not proven, but I have an intuition that any attempt at a running restart would be biased in some direction, whereas it is IOtTMCO that four independent tosses will yield one random hexidecimal digit.
When we start considering patents, the situation is much worse. The pace of innovation in most fields is very fast, and event the current term of patents is often sufficient to stifle progress rather than to encourage it.
Remember that the goal was to encourage ongoing creativity by authors and inventors, not simply to make publishers and corporate research labs filthy rich.
Most of my experimental attempts have involved email, and there the crucial problem is that my complicated file structure has always been destroyed in the process. It is possible that a non-folder-based solution along the lines of Gmail would solve that problem, but it would need to have highly reliable import capabilities. Also, I have strong reservations about importing my personal email to some other server, even Google's with their quasi-promise to do no evil. Not exactly binding in a court of law, where possession is nine points.
You are talking about something called "first sale" that gives you certain legal rights, such as selling or loaning the book. That is also defined legally, and the notion is under attack by the publishers. So far Congress has resisted some of the efforts, but the publishers are still in the market to buy the required politicians.
Too busy to grab the links just now, and the thread will be old and dead before I have time to do so, but several of my recent posts have been on this topic. You can search for them (assuming you have the time and interest).
First, Google's long-term goal is rather similar to what was mentioned early in the post. Recently Google even announced a time frame for completing the project. Around 300 years, if I remember correctly.
Second, I concur that copyright law has been abused and now extends in areas completely outside of the original intention of the idea. This is actually the natural result of successful and long-term lobbying efforts by publishers, who naturally had the most to gain from twisting and distorting the copyright system in this way. However, I doubt any simple cure is possible. I saw 14 years mentioned frequently, but that's not a holy number or anything. I think the actual "best" solution would need to be some sort of equation for each category of work, with the economic benefit to creators balanced against the time-related value and the "social need" to devalue the old in order to motivate the creation of new material. (The publishers have never had more than a parasitical role, if you ask me. They have mostly succeeded only in maximizing their own incomes, not the creators.)
The people who are most upset by the coming changes are the ones who stand to lose the most, which is clearly the publishers in this case. They have an existing business model which has worked quite well, to the tune of billions of dollars. If it was at all possible, they would like to stop the clock at the moment of maximum cash flow. That is no more possible than running the clock backwards.
Please do me one favor. Designate me as your foe, so I will more conveniently know to ignore any of your future posts that I stumble accross (though my settings make that rather unlikely once you have set the red dot in place).
Or were you just using my post as a place to hang your ideas? In the later case, you should be more scrupulous about your misrepresentations or make it more clear that your post is *NOT* actually related to mine.
Alternately, if you simply could not understand what I wrote, then you could ask for clarification.
Since I feel you offered no new substance that was related to what I actually wrote, I now ignore your substance. I will only reiterate the main thrust of my post, which was that someone is going to use the Web to make more content available. If not now and not Google (probably Microsoft?) and not books, then later and someone else and other forms of content. The publishing industry as it exists now is doomed. Time does not run backwards, no matter how fervently the Busheviks pray for it to do so.