The article is careless; they must be talking about fMRI, not MRI. The latter is the more familiar technology that provides images of brain morphology, usually by tweaking water protons. While the researchers are doubtless imaging to provide reference localization -- that is, a map of the brain -- the fMRI is entirely different because it measures brain metabolism, which is higher in parts of the brain that are more active, and so buring more sugar. So the first is a picture that looks like sliced brain, the latter is a map of hot spots that looks like an IR sensor image. They can integrate this with EEG (electroencephalogram), also, something we also couldn't do with old MRI. Cool.
Check here -- the first image you see is an overlay of functional hot spots (color) over a regular MRI (B&W). While on the topic of medical acronyms, there is not "CAT scan" anymore, it's CT for computed tomography. The earliest machines could only do axial cuts, hence "A" in CAT. But the public and TV shows like saying CAT. I used to work around CT, too, almost 20 years ago.
I'm jealous because I did research on psychiatric patients with MRI ten years ago, which was limited to detected tumors, atrophy, and other gross physical changes. That's very useful -- people with mental illnes have in some cases revealed what appears to be long-term degeneration marked by atrophy (shrinkage) of relevant lobes --but does not have the amazing possibilities of instantly detecting changes in brain activity. This is quite a bit short of reading your mind! Just 10 years ago the imaging MRI was a stunning achievement, now we're spoiled and moving into the next phase.
Is this research for marketing purposes invasive? Nah. It's just an (expensive) attempt to further quantify reaction to marketing, as has been done up to now with questionnaries and the like. It's not sneaky like subliminal advertising, which didn't work anyway despite being a compelling idea and making for a great episode of Columbo (conspiracy theorists disagree; scientists generally don't; but advertisers and maybeRepublicans still try it anyway).
Anyway, advertisers have long had a general idea (sex) of (sex) what (sex) moves (sex) product (send me money). The marketers looking upon consumers as a horde of cattle, that's kind of patronizing, but it's nothing new.
By definition, "excessive" military spending pays no dividends. If it does, it's not excessive.
Yeah, military coordination in Kosovo was pretty bad, like the aircraft couldn't even share encrypted radio communication. But that's another problem, and one I think we all belatedly tried to address after the war.
And if the US is NATO's backbone (obviously it is) we should be compensated for our excess contribution, as we were in the Gulf. As I recall, we've been giving a disproportionate amount of peecekeeping on the ground to our allies, a job we really don't want.
I couldn't be farther apart from the Cato Institute! Even a liberal (me, and that doesn't mean socialist or communist) will tell you the same, it's about stomping on another's person rights and welfare because you want something.
And I damn well consider it a moral entitlement to be paid for my work. I work for you, you pay me. Ask the union movement if there was no moral dimension to their work. Sure, getting paid it's an economic matter, also, but economics is a proxy for people's welfare. Also, the artist expects to get paid when putting the item on the market. There's no right of the public to ignore the artist's wishes and impose their own idea of the way to market the artist's stuff. If the artists wanted to give away free samples, he or she would; if they don't that's their business. Don't patronizingly say your theft is good for them. That's unethical and offensive.
You say you're good about it and consider it sampling. I'm sure you delete everything you don't pay for after a while. Fine, you're rare. But that's not the consensus. Piracy is routine in some parts of the world because the law simply is unenforced, and real people besides the big bad studios lose money, and, surprise, prices for the honest buyers are higher. That is economics, but it's also offensive.
Reality check: all this copying of copyrighted stuff is pretty trivial in the scheme of things. But it's still wrong. See what % of artists you can get to agree they don't really know what they're doing, that you are smarter.
No, no, I'm quite sure many people don't get it at all. I remember the Gulf War very well. The military had finally learned to manage the press and fed them very precise information while preventing them from seeing anything. Peter Arnett was the only thorn, not that his reporting was unproblematic.
The videos they showed of smart bombs zeroing in on their targets were impressive but immensely misleading. There was little of any discussion of civilian deaths, or consideration of Iraqi conscript deaths. All that mattered was the trivial number of American deaths, and that has become the primary reason behind the overwhelming force doctrine. It may be a significant reason we botched getting bin Laden and many of his lieutenants, our unwillingness to put anyone on the ground.
Vietnam -- it's a myth we just didn't try hard enough. I don't remember our peak troop strength, but it far from trivial, and we bombed the heck out of not just the North -- yes, subject to some arbitrary limits -- and Laos and Cambodia, far more tonnage than the whole of WWII. An unknown number of Vietnamese died, possible as many as a million (which, if you look at the kill ratio in Iraq, is not implausible). We lost 60,000 people over there, a huge number in 1968 alone. We were defending an unpopular southern government and faced a significant VC opposition. It's not even clear we should have won the war, which wasn't even called a war until recently (the "Vietnam Conflict"). Yes, there were huge problems with th political management of the war, but much of that reflected the deep ambivalence of the public.
People think that's all been fixed now. "Surgical strikes" have taken care of everything. Never mind we dumped lots of dumb bombs, too, in tens of thousands of sorties that were not perfect; even if each killed just one or two Iraqis, the casualties were immense. There is a point where the public cares about even enemy deaths, especially given the gruesome way many died. There was some recenlt attention to the hundreds of soldiers who were buried alive in trenches by our bulldozers. But the military screened them from that, and because there was indifference to the censorship our impressions of the war are very skewed.
That doesn't mean "fight no wars." But avoid it where possible, and President Bush doesn't seem to get that, pressing war over the advice of his own generals such as Powell.
"it's just a tool" -- so's a lockpick; it is subject to misuse, so its sale is regulated; something with no redeeming use may be banned outright.
There's no hole in the hypothetical -- the artist does not sell CD's -- and I said he will make less money with piracy -- it does happen, and people don't pay for what they can get for free. Artists sue for copyright infringement all the time; they wouldn't have to if people were honest. Anyway, you can't change the facts in the hypothetical!
...why the heck they do this, too. Crowds make me itch. But a lot of people *love* it -- I read about people who dropped $1000 or more on Christmas gifts, and I sure many spent more than they intended because they were spend-saving or "spaving" -- and there's probably a race to the bottom among retailers to out-do each other and pack the people in.
I think the kind of shopper who gets an adrenaline rush from this kind of shopping -- and if they do, fine, so long as they don't blow apart their credit rating -- likes to touch the merchandise, and likes the shopping experience. It's entertaining. Hey, I still go to bookstores even though I can get most things cheaper at home. There's the power to browse, and the opportunity to impulse buy; the sharpest discount and greatest convenience aren't the whole thing.
Now, the whole holiday going down the materialism tube, that's a whole 'nuther debate.:)
Well... Zappa, or at least his widow, is hardly indifferent to copyright. I think you may be seriously misinterpreting those lyrics.
Re the Sonny Bono Act, his widow: "I'm all for copyright term extension, to maintain the integrity of the artists' intentions," says Gail Zappa, widow of recording artist/composer Frank Zappa, "even though for most it's an uphill fight to get control." Frank Zappa got ownership of his masters before he died; his widow owns them but has sold the distribution rights to Rykodisc"
By art I think the law encompasses both copyrightable "fixed" stuff and performances, etc. So copyright plucks out part of the whole.
As for innovation, I think of that as synonymous with creativity. Innovative, creative, similar? And the copyright -- it's a double-edged sword, limiting use of other people's work while also forcing people to come up with something new, to innovate. Just another way of looking at it.
But I don't know anything about art, I just know what I l---:)
What's the book about? Why don't you just post it here?;-)
I assume Limewire is in the same technological grouping as Kazaa etc.? I've been playing with it and am very impressed; it's much easier than Napster and quite capable.
I'm fascinated by the P2P technology for its possibilities as a distributed sharing technology. I'm curious though, how sharing files out of homes and businesses (I assume all these T3 lines I see don't go to people's houses!) is legally different from putting the same files on commercially hosted filespace? (In case I said that wrong, I mean the server space we rent or get gratis with an ISP account.) I don't think there is a difference, aside from it being harder to get caught.
The other Q is what % of the current file sharing is legal, and I mean under current standards of fair use for the copyrighted material. This was a factor in the VCR litigation, that the machines have significant legitimate uses outside of pirating movies or TV shows -- your nephew bar mitzvah, weddings, fair use, etc. Is a significant fraction of your sharing legal, or minor violations as where you try-before-you-buy?
I know many people believe copyright law should change. But whether you do or not, you must see this sharing technology will either cause significant changes or be banned. I don't see a stable path ahead. What would be the absolute best thing for a starving artist who wants to distribute internet only and can't afford to lose revenue to copying? For the sake for argument, let's make this person really sympathetic: If he doesn't sell 100 copies of his unbelievably wonderful epic work, he's dead, or his daughter doesn't get dialysis, or whatever is takes. With piracy unchecked, he will sell 10 copies. Without piracy, 1,000. Digital watermarks? Some sort of anti-copying technology? A sudden wave of honesty among potential buyers? Music, video, etc. long has been and always will pilfered, but if P2P increases that significantly it will hurt revenues, even if it doesn't happen to now.
I think they're rolling in parochial schools which are cheaper, but expect community work and are not particularly expandable. I *think* the nat'l average is around $6-8,000 among public schools. It is very important to factor in cost-of-living, as that drives significant differences in salaries, which are in turn over 90% of school expenses.
Naturally, there are many strong opinions about education here, as anywhere.
Imagine if Hitler had been beat down in the 1930s rather than the 1940s.
It'd be nice, but it never would have happened -- for political reasons. The military was there between the French and British, but the attitude was noninterferance, then appeasement, then war. And they were fairly shocked by how well Hitler expanded the military and then invaded his neighbors. Let's hope we see the next Hitler coming, if there has to be one. And that we do something.
I'm not anti-military, but I do think some of us (no names:) reach from the military option much too quickly. All this video-game warfare is undoing the lesson of Vietnam that war sucks, good intentioned or bad.
I wouldn't try a line of Mickey Mouse characters anytime soon, even if Disney may have some technical defect (I don't have time to research it). The paper you cite in the other post is an argument against copyright, but not necessarily compelling one, plus it was written by a mere student. The highest stack of academic journals is not very persuasive to a court. I know Disney is vicious in enforcing its copyrights -- even the local cake shop has a warning letter from Disney posted, warning not to try putting any Disney characters on its custom cakes! Mickey Mouse is so entwined with the Disney image, I have no idea how the copyright/trademark will play out. It may be a moot point if Disney keeps lobbying Congress for extensions (and assuming the Lessig case doesn't pan out). Regardless, if Mickey isn't Disney's trademark, what is? Think they'll switch to Tinkerbell? Pluto?
Orcs -- definitely not invented by Tolkein, maybe.:) He uses it to mean a super-nasty breed of goblins; I think the movie suggested some sort of interbreeding with humans or some such. Bulfinch's references an orc, but one quite different from a goblin! Maybe JRR just liked the word.
Oh, I know IANAL is a CYA (and a lawyer would include one in a posting, too), I just argue for full disclosure. It's pretty funny to preface something with "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but this is how it'd be if I were in charge." But what the heck, people can read between the lines.
And IAAL, just slumming here I guess.:) Being a lawyer sure as hell doesn't mean you know what your talking about, just that you're paid to talk.
I'm not sure where all these unusual interpretations for garden-variety legal terms are coming from. There is plenty of room for debate about reform, but semantic torture is not the way there. Intellectual property simply is an umbrella term. You cite the Cornell database -- good choice, my alma mater:) -- here are their entries for IP.
RMS is arguing for a new, improved definition. That's fine, though probably unproductive. Calling IP a "fad" because it is mere 35 years or so old is odd. But I'm not too caught up in the linguistics thing and "what is a word."
Of course copyright, trademark, and patent have different groups of laws and precedent. That's why they're called copyright, trademark, and patent.
Being in separate titles of the USC is of no weight. The USC is not a statute, it's just a convenient compilation of different statutes.
Tolkien, if alive and aggressively marketing today, would copyright and trademark the whole lot of his creations. Trademark would "kick in" for his original signature creations -- didn't he come up with orcs?
As for GUI thing, no one really benefitted from those who lifted their concepts. I stil don't understand what tthe heck happened, but I haven't tried, either.
ANYWAY, this all started with "Copyright does NOT protect innovation." I disagree. I've thought of being a writer, but sure as heck wouldn't/couldn't publish work for free for a living.
But disbanding the army is a canard. Almost no one recommends that. The issue is how much, of $350 billion+ (the link is joking, but the figure is about right) is appropriate, or could be diverted to other projects. I assumed the original poster was referring to military waste. How much will the Iraq war cost? Is it necessary? The so-so peace has been maintained for many reasosns economic and diplomatic, in addition to military. There are many options, I don't think it can be said we have the best ones.
I doubt it's half the money for private, though I'd like to see a figure. I know my old school (private) was and is $$$, and it is outstanding academically. I was surprised to learn that our spending in Arlington VA is in the top 10 nationwide, about $12,000 per pupil and similar to private school. Yet the teachers generally can't afford to live here.
But I don't deny CA has education problems. I doubt cutting spending will do it -- you're also a very expensive state for one thing -- but agree there should be more bang for the buck. Frankly I think it's time to cut the state in half, or thirds...:)
"Copyright infringement" is too hard to say, and it doesn't have a good anthropomorphic form (copyright infringer?). Yech, let's get rid of that!;-)
If anything, the education curve has been to persuade people piracy is wrongful. Most people don't get it and copy whatever on the flimsiest of excuses, and would never admit to being either a copyright infringer (if they even knew what that meant) and a pirate.
And, as I said, I'm pretty sure the pirates named themselves.
Copyright, patent, and trademark are all just forms of IP law.
As for Tolkien, I don't know any details, but the law is not self-executing. Private parties have to litigate it. Perhaps Tolkien did not discover "trade dress" and the C&D letter in time. I have no doubt the copyrights on his books are intact. Anyway, he consciously ripped off much from older traditions in Welsh and Anglo-Saxon mythology himself. Imitators are not necessarily derivative of his version. Disney the copyright nut received many of its stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm tales, and so on -- public domain.
GUI -- microsoft stole from apple stole from xerox. We're probably better off they got away from it. The look and feel thing was novel and shaky from the start. Other models are probably superior to copyright.
Music -- Patent? Trademark? Really? Enforcement of copyright and, lately, interferance with illegal duplication, are the usuall routes.
I *think* most people are intelligent enough to know the difference between piracy ("Blackbeard") and software piracy ("warez"). It's efficient. And finding a prettier term for software piracy will not redeem it.
If I recall, it was the pirates themselves who came up with the term. I remember it from the late 70's. Made them feel sexy or something.
I suppose the argument goes something like, "Private companies won't fund altruistic space flight, so the gov't has to foot the bill." "Companies are too nearsighted; they wouldn't appreciate the impact of expensive space based R&D."
I think you misread even the libertarian perspective that more should be contracted out -- i.e., "privatized" which sounds like a huge subsidy. Nothing expect the unprofitability of it is holding back private space flight, and there's plenty of it. Also, NASA does contract out tons of work, just about everything outside of operations.
$40 billion is peanuts anyway. Our annual budget is nearly $2 trillion. And remember, all you can hope for is increased efficiency, a discount on that $40 billion. You'll never get it all back, or even half.
Your theory is that your education sucks so you should cut funding to it? Just throw in the towel? Please tell me you didn't think that through.
Plenty of places spend much more on education than California; the problem is definitely not an excess of money. When I was growing up in California, it was known to have decent education. That was shortly before the "tax revolt."
It is all to easy to say, hey, if we just eliminated waste, we could... But it's not that easy to do. The Bush Administration said something similar when they claimed they could make up a good part of the deficit by just getting tax cheats. Turned out to be harder than that.
Prices since 1984 has risen roughly 50%, and the money was spent in an escalating curve, so it wouldn't make a huge difference whether the number is in real dollars or not. Always a good Q, though.
For example, the Brookings Institute recently estimated the total cost of our nuclear testing, buildup, and maintenance at $4 trillion, adjusted. That includes the Manhattan Project, which cost billions.
I can easily make the argument that the money spent on defense is orders of magnitude more valuable than money spent ANYWHERE else.
OK, make the argument. Remember the $800 hammers and toilet seats.;-) Today I'm skeptical of the value of programs like ISS, but I have no doubt of the worth of excess military spending. By definition "excess" is "excess." Being committed to defense does not mean signing off on waste.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is careless; they must be talking about fMRI, not MRI. The latter is the more familiar technology that provides images of brain morphology, usually by tweaking water protons. While the researchers are doubtless imaging to provide reference localization -- that is, a map of the brain -- the fMRI is entirely different because it measures brain metabolism, which is higher in parts of the brain that are more active, and so buring more sugar. So the first is a picture that looks like sliced brain, the latter is a map of hot spots that looks like an IR sensor image. They can integrate this with EEG (electroencephalogram), also, something we also couldn't do with old MRI. Cool.
Check here -- the first image you see is an overlay of functional hot spots (color) over a regular MRI (B&W). While on the topic of medical acronyms, there is not "CAT scan" anymore, it's CT for computed tomography. The earliest machines could only do axial cuts, hence "A" in CAT. But the public and TV shows like saying CAT. I used to work around CT, too, almost 20 years ago.
I'm jealous because I did research on psychiatric patients with MRI ten years ago, which was limited to detected tumors, atrophy, and other gross physical changes. That's very useful -- people with mental illnes have in some cases revealed what appears to be long-term degeneration marked by atrophy (shrinkage) of relevant lobes --but does not have the amazing possibilities of instantly detecting changes in brain activity. This is quite a bit short of reading your mind! Just 10 years ago the imaging MRI was a stunning achievement, now we're spoiled and moving into the next phase.
Is this research for marketing purposes invasive? Nah. It's just an (expensive) attempt to further quantify reaction to marketing, as has been done up to now with questionnaries and the like. It's not sneaky like subliminal advertising, which didn't work anyway despite being a compelling idea and making for a great episode of Columbo (conspiracy theorists disagree; scientists generally don't; but advertisers and maybe Republicans still try it anyway).
Anyway, advertisers have long had a general idea (sex) of (sex) what (sex) moves (sex) product (send me money). The marketers looking upon consumers as a horde of cattle, that's kind of patronizing, but it's nothing new.
Will there be Customs at the borders? ;-)
Don't forget, Los Angeles still gets everyone else's water.
By definition, "excessive" military spending pays no dividends. If it does, it's not excessive.
Yeah, military coordination in Kosovo was pretty bad, like the aircraft couldn't even share encrypted radio communication. But that's another problem, and one I think we all belatedly tried to address after the war.
And if the US is NATO's backbone (obviously it is) we should be compensated for our excess contribution, as we were in the Gulf. As I recall, we've been giving a disproportionate amount of peecekeeping on the ground to our allies, a job we really don't want.
I couldn't be farther apart from the Cato Institute! Even a liberal (me, and that doesn't mean socialist or communist) will tell you the same, it's about stomping on another's person rights and welfare because you want something.
And I damn well consider it a moral entitlement to be paid for my work. I work for you, you pay me. Ask the union movement if there was no moral dimension to their work. Sure, getting paid it's an economic matter, also, but economics is a proxy for people's welfare. Also, the artist expects to get paid when putting the item on the market. There's no right of the public to ignore the artist's wishes and impose their own idea of the way to market the artist's stuff. If the artists wanted to give away free samples, he or she would; if they don't that's their business. Don't patronizingly say your theft is good for them. That's unethical and offensive.
You say you're good about it and consider it sampling. I'm sure you delete everything you don't pay for after a while. Fine, you're rare. But that's not the consensus. Piracy is routine in some parts of the world because the law simply is unenforced, and real people besides the big bad studios lose money, and, surprise, prices for the honest buyers are higher. That is economics, but it's also offensive.
Reality check: all this copying of copyrighted stuff is pretty trivial in the scheme of things. But it's still wrong. See what % of artists you can get to agree they don't really know what they're doing, that you are smarter.
No, no, I'm quite sure many people don't get it at all. I remember the Gulf War very well. The military had finally learned to manage the press and fed them very precise information while preventing them from seeing anything. Peter Arnett was the only thorn, not that his reporting was unproblematic.
The videos they showed of smart bombs zeroing in on their targets were impressive but immensely misleading. There was little of any discussion of civilian deaths, or consideration of Iraqi conscript deaths. All that mattered was the trivial number of American deaths, and that has become the primary reason behind the overwhelming force doctrine. It may be a significant reason we botched getting bin Laden and many of his lieutenants, our unwillingness to put anyone on the ground.
Vietnam -- it's a myth we just didn't try hard enough. I don't remember our peak troop strength, but it far from trivial, and we bombed the heck out of not just the North -- yes, subject to some arbitrary limits -- and Laos and Cambodia, far more tonnage than the whole of WWII. An unknown number of Vietnamese died, possible as many as a million (which, if you look at the kill ratio in Iraq, is not implausible). We lost 60,000 people over there, a huge number in 1968 alone. We were defending an unpopular southern government and faced a significant VC opposition. It's not even clear we should have won the war, which wasn't even called a war until recently (the "Vietnam Conflict"). Yes, there were huge problems with th political management of the war, but much of that reflected the deep ambivalence of the public.
People think that's all been fixed now. "Surgical strikes" have taken care of everything. Never mind we dumped lots of dumb bombs, too, in tens of thousands of sorties that were not perfect; even if each killed just one or two Iraqis, the casualties were immense. There is a point where the public cares about even enemy deaths, especially given the gruesome way many died. There was some recenlt attention to the hundreds of soldiers who were buried alive in trenches by our bulldozers. But the military screened them from that, and because there was indifference to the censorship our impressions of the war are very skewed.
That doesn't mean "fight no wars." But avoid it where possible, and President Bush doesn't seem to get that, pressing war over the advice of his own generals such as Powell.
"it's just a tool" -- so's a lockpick; it is subject to misuse, so its sale is regulated; something with no redeeming use may be banned outright.
There's no hole in the hypothetical -- the artist does not sell CD's -- and I said he will make less money with piracy -- it does happen, and people don't pay for what they can get for free. Artists sue for copyright infringement all the time; they wouldn't have to if people were honest. Anyway, you can't change the facts in the hypothetical!
...why the heck they do this, too. Crowds make me itch. But a lot of people *love* it -- I read about people who dropped $1000 or more on Christmas gifts, and I sure many spent more than they intended because they were spend-saving or "spaving" -- and there's probably a race to the bottom among retailers to out-do each other and pack the people in.
:)
I think the kind of shopper who gets an adrenaline rush from this kind of shopping -- and if they do, fine, so long as they don't blow apart their credit rating -- likes to touch the merchandise, and likes the shopping experience. It's entertaining. Hey, I still go to bookstores even though I can get most things cheaper at home. There's the power to browse, and the opportunity to impulse buy; the sharpest discount and greatest convenience aren't the whole thing.
Now, the whole holiday going down the materialism tube, that's a whole 'nuther debate.
Well ... Zappa, or at least his widow, is hardly indifferent to copyright. I think you may be seriously misinterpreting those lyrics.
Re the Sonny Bono Act, his widow: "I'm all for copyright term extension, to maintain the integrity of the artists' intentions," says Gail Zappa, widow of recording artist/composer Frank Zappa, "even though for most it's an uphill fight to get control." Frank Zappa got ownership of his masters before he died; his widow owns them but has sold the distribution rights to Rykodisc"
And a recent lawsuit.
There's a difference between the death of expression and the death of copyright.
What about innovative art? ;-)
:)
;-)
By art I think the law encompasses both copyrightable "fixed" stuff and performances, etc. So copyright plucks out part of the whole.
As for innovation, I think of that as synonymous with creativity. Innovative, creative, similar? And the copyright -- it's a double-edged sword, limiting use of other people's work while also forcing people to come up with something new, to innovate. Just another way of looking at it.
But I don't know anything about art, I just know what I l---
What's the book about? Why don't you just post it here?
I think this case may bring to head many issues.
/. white paper? :)
I assume Limewire is in the same technological grouping as Kazaa etc.? I've been playing with it and am very impressed; it's much easier than Napster and quite capable.
I'm fascinated by the P2P technology for its possibilities as a distributed sharing technology. I'm curious though, how sharing files out of homes and businesses (I assume all these T3 lines I see don't go to people's houses!) is legally different from putting the same files on commercially hosted filespace? (In case I said that wrong, I mean the server space we rent or get gratis with an ISP account.) I don't think there is a difference, aside from it being harder to get caught.
The other Q is what % of the current file sharing is legal, and I mean under current standards of fair use for the copyrighted material. This was a factor in the VCR litigation, that the machines have significant legitimate uses outside of pirating movies or TV shows -- your nephew bar mitzvah, weddings, fair use, etc. Is a significant fraction of your sharing legal, or minor violations as where you try-before-you-buy?
I know many people believe copyright law should change. But whether you do or not, you must see this sharing technology will either cause significant changes or be banned. I don't see a stable path ahead. What would be the absolute best thing for a starving artist who wants to distribute internet only and can't afford to lose revenue to copying? For the sake for argument, let's make this person really sympathetic: If he doesn't sell 100 copies of his unbelievably wonderful epic work, he's dead, or his daughter doesn't get dialysis, or whatever is takes. With piracy unchecked, he will sell 10 copies. Without piracy, 1,000. Digital watermarks? Some sort of anti-copying technology? A sudden wave of honesty among potential buyers? Music, video, etc. long has been and always will pilfered, but if P2P increases that significantly it will hurt revenues, even if it doesn't happen to now.
How about a
I think they're rolling in parochial schools which are cheaper, but expect community work and are not particularly expandable. I *think* the nat'l average is around $6-8,000 among public schools. It is very important to factor in cost-of-living, as that drives significant differences in salaries, which are in turn over 90% of school expenses.
Naturally, there are many strong opinions about education here, as anywhere.
Imagine if Hitler had been beat down in the 1930s rather than the 1940s.
:) reach from the military option much too quickly. All this video-game warfare is undoing the lesson of Vietnam that war sucks, good intentioned or bad.
It'd be nice, but it never would have happened -- for political reasons. The military was there between the French and British, but the attitude was noninterferance, then appeasement, then war. And they were fairly shocked by how well Hitler expanded the military and then invaded his neighbors. Let's hope we see the next Hitler coming, if there has to be one. And that we do something.
I'm not anti-military, but I do think some of us (no names
We're on the same page.
:) He uses it to mean a super-nasty breed of goblins; I think the movie suggested some sort of interbreeding with humans or some such. Bulfinch's references an orc, but one quite different from a goblin! Maybe JRR just liked the word.
I wouldn't try a line of Mickey Mouse characters anytime soon, even if Disney may have some technical defect (I don't have time to research it). The paper you cite in the other post is an argument against copyright, but not necessarily compelling one, plus it was written by a mere student. The highest stack of academic journals is not very persuasive to a court. I know Disney is vicious in enforcing its copyrights -- even the local cake shop has a warning letter from Disney posted, warning not to try putting any Disney characters on its custom cakes! Mickey Mouse is so entwined with the Disney image, I have no idea how the copyright/trademark will play out. It may be a moot point if Disney keeps lobbying Congress for extensions (and assuming the Lessig case doesn't pan out). Regardless, if Mickey isn't Disney's trademark, what is? Think they'll switch to Tinkerbell? Pluto?
Orcs -- definitely not invented by Tolkein, maybe.
Oh, I know IANAL is a CYA (and a lawyer would include one in a posting, too), I just argue for full disclosure. It's pretty funny to preface something with "I have no idea what I'm talking about, but this is how it'd be if I were in charge." But what the heck, people can read between the lines.
:) Being a lawyer sure as hell doesn't mean you know what your talking about, just that you're paid to talk.
And IAAL, just slumming here I guess.
I'm not sure where all these unusual interpretations for garden-variety legal terms are coming from. There is plenty of room for debate about reform, but semantic torture is not the way there. Intellectual property simply is an umbrella term. You cite the Cornell database -- good choice, my alma mater :) -- here are their entries for IP.
RMS is arguing for a new, improved definition. That's fine, though probably unproductive. Calling IP a "fad" because it is mere 35 years or so old is odd. But I'm not too caught up in the linguistics thing and "what is a word."
Of course copyright, trademark, and patent have different groups of laws and precedent. That's why they're called copyright, trademark, and patent.
Being in separate titles of the USC is of no weight. The USC is not a statute, it's just a convenient compilation of different statutes.
Tolkien, if alive and aggressively marketing today, would copyright and trademark the whole lot of his creations. Trademark would "kick in" for his original signature creations -- didn't he come up with orcs?
As for GUI thing, no one really benefitted from those who lifted their concepts. I stil don't understand what tthe heck happened, but I haven't tried, either.
ANYWAY, this all started with "Copyright does NOT protect innovation." I disagree. I've thought of being a writer, but sure as heck wouldn't/couldn't publish work for free for a living.
But disbanding the army is a canard. Almost no one recommends that. The issue is how much, of $350 billion+ (the link is joking, but the figure is about right) is appropriate, or could be diverted to other projects. I assumed the original poster was referring to military waste. How much will the Iraq war cost? Is it necessary? The so-so peace has been maintained for many reasosns economic and diplomatic, in addition to military. There are many options, I don't think it can be said we have the best ones.
I doubt it's half the money for private, though I'd like to see a figure. I know my old school (private) was and is $$$, and it is outstanding academically. I was surprised to learn that our spending in Arlington VA is in the top 10 nationwide, about $12,000 per pupil and similar to private school. Yet the teachers generally can't afford to live here.
:)
But I don't deny CA has education problems. I doubt cutting spending will do it -- you're also a very expensive state for one thing -- but agree there should be more bang for the buck. Frankly I think it's time to cut the state in half, or thirds...
Wrong? Morally, it deprives the author of his expected reward. Legally, it's illegal. The usual reasons.
"Copyright infringement" is too hard to say, and it doesn't have a good anthropomorphic form (copyright infringer?). Yech, let's get rid of that! ;-)
If anything, the education curve has been to persuade people piracy is wrongful. Most people don't get it and copy whatever on the flimsiest of excuses, and would never admit to being either a copyright infringer (if they even knew what that meant) and a pirate.
And, as I said, I'm pretty sure the pirates named themselves.
Copyright, patent, and trademark are all just forms of IP law.
As for Tolkien, I don't know any details, but the law is not self-executing. Private parties have to litigate it. Perhaps Tolkien did not discover "trade dress" and the C&D letter in time. I have no doubt the copyrights on his books are intact. Anyway, he consciously ripped off much from older traditions in Welsh and Anglo-Saxon mythology himself. Imitators are not necessarily derivative of his version. Disney the copyright nut received many of its stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm tales, and so on -- public domain.
GUI -- microsoft stole from apple stole from xerox. We're probably better off they got away from it. The look and feel thing was novel and shaky from the start. Other models are probably superior to copyright.
Music -- Patent? Trademark? Really? Enforcement of copyright and, lately, interferance with illegal duplication, are the usuall routes.
I *think* most people are intelligent enough to know the difference between piracy ("Blackbeard") and software piracy ("warez"). It's efficient. And finding a prettier term for software piracy will not redeem it.
If I recall, it was the pirates themselves who came up with the term. I remember it from the late 70's. Made them feel sexy or something.
I suppose the argument goes something like, "Private companies won't fund altruistic space flight, so the gov't has to foot the bill." "Companies are too nearsighted; they wouldn't appreciate the impact of expensive space based R&D."
I think you misread even the libertarian perspective that more should be contracted out -- i.e., "privatized" which sounds like a huge subsidy. Nothing expect the unprofitability of it is holding back private space flight, and there's plenty of it. Also, NASA does contract out tons of work, just about everything outside of operations.
$40 billion is peanuts anyway. Our annual budget is nearly $2 trillion. And remember, all you can hope for is increased efficiency, a discount on that $40 billion. You'll never get it all back, or even half.
Your theory is that your education sucks so you should cut funding to it? Just throw in the towel? Please tell me you didn't think that through.
Plenty of places spend much more on education than California; the problem is definitely not an excess of money. When I was growing up in California, it was known to have decent education. That was shortly before the "tax revolt."
It is all to easy to say, hey, if we just eliminated waste, we could... But it's not that easy to do. The Bush Administration said something similar when they claimed they could make up a good part of the deficit by just getting tax cheats. Turned out to be harder than that.
Prices since 1984 has risen roughly 50%, and the money was spent in an escalating curve, so it wouldn't make a huge difference whether the number is in real dollars or not. Always a good Q, though.
For example, the Brookings Institute recently estimated the total cost of our nuclear testing, buildup, and maintenance at $4 trillion, adjusted. That includes the Manhattan Project, which cost billions.
I can easily make the argument that the money spent on defense is orders of magnitude more valuable than money spent ANYWHERE else.
;-)
OK, make the argument. Remember the $800 hammers and toilet seats.
Today I'm skeptical of the value of programs like ISS, but I have no doubt of the worth of excess military spending. By definition "excess" is "excess." Being committed to defense does not mean signing off on waste.