I'm remember reading that 3/4 of the soldiers in WWI and WWII didn't aim at anything. They were conditioned to shoot at little bullseyes, not people. Notice how the military trains on human shaped targets now? Human-aim-fire-response.
The statistics I remember are that a full half of the infantry recruits in these wars didn't want to run the risk of killing anyone, and so fired over the enemy's heads. Another substantial fraction didn't mind killing the enemy, but didn't want to know about it if they did, and so fired in the general direction of the enemy without looking too hard to find out what the results were. Only something like 10-15% aimed their weapon at another human being and fired until he fell.
I don't know that silhouette training would help most of those people terribly much. One feature of a volunteer army, on the other hand, is it self-selects for people who at least initially think they are willing to kill.
Even so, a PBS show did a slot where they interviewed Gulf War fighter pilots, and it was amazing how many of them sincerely believed that for all the machinery and real estate they had blown up, they had caused no human casualties. They really believed that whoever was inside that plane or building got out, somehow.
Heck, if it's just a good look down you want to experience, high altitude ballooning would involve substantially less captial outlay, take you almost as high, and let you look down for substantially longer.
Unnecessary, because the income rate cancels out of the accounting equation. If the copyright isn't earning much, then it's not worth much, and so the term a drops out. The only variable is the interest rate, and given the lengths of time we're talking about here, it is probably fair to set that to an average of what the prime lending rate has been over the last umpteen years.
Read footnote 17 of the court's decision in Eldred. While they shy away from saying that the 99-year term marks the outer boundary of the "limited times," they do mention both it and another common law term, "lives in being plus 21 years" as worth taking into consideration when drawing the line between constitutionally acceptable times, and those that while limited in a dictionary sense are effectively perpetual times.
Let's give the creator the benefit of the doubt and say that whatever they have created is of enduring value, and the copyright on their creation is worth a perpetuity of some annual income A.
Then, the present value of the copyright is, and will remain, A/i, where i is the interest rate.
Meanwhile, at time t, the present value of the copyright they have already held is A/i * (exp[it] - 1).
So, at some time, it is fair to both the author and public to expire the copyright, because the present value of the copyright (that is being transferred from author to public) is equal to the present value of the copyright that the author has held in the past (that was given to the author by the public). This occurs when t = (ln 2)/i.
Then, the proper term of copyright depends on the interest rate, thusly:
2% 35 years 3% 23 years 4% 17 years 5% 14 years 6% 12 years 7% 10 years 8% 9 years
In the US anyway, it will be a hard legal case to show that a term > 99 years is a "limited time" in a constitutional sense. Under the common law, there are a number of instances where the maximum length of time something can be leased, etc. is 99 years, because a longer term would be indistinguishable from outright sale.
My understanding is that it requires an absolute majority (a majority of the total number of seats in the Parliament rather than of the number of votes actually cast).
Is the European Parliament known for large numbers of MEPs not bothering to show up to vote?
If these suits are actually against end-users, it is a major change in **AA strategy, and potentially a risky one.
In the world of print, which is what the law was written for in the first place and where it is most clear what is legal and what isn't, if Joe's Pirate Press publishes an unauthorized edition of the latest bestseller, they have infringed the copyright, but I am in the clear if I buy from Joe, because copyright restricts reproduction and publication, not possession.
On the internet, things are less clear, because if I download from Joe's FTP, it is not exactly clear who has made the copy. Sure, I requested it, but it was Joe who sent the bits my way. Joe could have sent me the bits even if I hadn't requested them. I don't know of any relevant case law, but a case exists to be made that the downloader of a file is in the same position as the purchaser of a book.
The one thing the **AA's don't want is for such a case to actually make it to court and risk setting a precedent that the downloader is legally in the clear, and only the party that offers the file for download infringes.
Roughly speaking, the EU has a bicameral legislature, with the two houses being the Parliament and the Council. However, neither one of those bodies can introduce legislation; rather, legislation begins with a third body, the Commission.
Now, European regulations ostensibly do not permit the patenting of a computer program, as such. However, the European Patent Office, has for a while now been interpreting those regulations differently than you or I would, and issuing software patents anyway. However, such patents have not held up in court.
So the Commission drafts a new patent directive that would explicitly permit software patents that had some "technical effect," a term broad enough to encompass just about anything.
The draft directive next goes to the Parliament, where it gets severely amended, such that it would exclude most software patents.
The amended directive then goes to the Council, where it is re-amended to resemble the original version. And then something weird happens. While the pro-patent contingent got its act together long enough to amend the directive, it never got around to voting to send the amended version back to Parliament, and then, it was unclear whether they had a majority in Council anymore, and then, Council went on break.
If the Council ever gets around to sending its version back to Parliament, Parliament will have to scrape together an absolute majority (rather than the qualified majority they needed to have to amend it in the first place) to either reject or further confuse the process. If they prove unable to do so within 3 (or 4, if they vote themselves a further delay) months (a distinct possibility), then the directive comes into force, and all the various national legislatures are supposed to harmonize their laws with the directive.
And the brown dwarfs are the problem: A 20 Jupiter ball of gas that condensed in a stellar nursery is a brown dwarf, but what about a 20 Jupiter ball of gas that that accreted in orbit around a star, and moreover, how do you even tell the difference?
If the US wanted to have a lower copyright term without renouncing Berne, they could adopt the approach Montana took with respect to the 55 mph national speed limit:
The term of Copyright is life + 50. However, after the first 56 years have elapsed, infringment carries a maximum penalty of a $1 fine.
If Thomas Kuhn is right, then scientific revolution only really takes place when the senior scientists who are invested in the old paradigm die or retire. (A good example in this century is the very slow acceptance of plate tectonics as even a theory to be taken seriously.)
It may be that immortality is the last great scientific advance to be achieved.
The open * movement cannot accurately be called either capitalist or communist. It more accurately fits what was in the early 20th century been called distributism. Essentially, the idea was (and is, again) that a economic unit large enough to sway the market singlehandedly, whether a for-profit organization or a state bureau, will not actually succeed in serving the public interest. In other words, beyond a certain point, the private motives of those who manage large economic interests prevent potential economies of scale from actually being realized by the public.
Except that pirated movie files, by and large, don't come from copied DVD's. They usually come from movie industry insiders and movie theater employees. Even if a DVD copy-protection system works, for the movie industry, it's like plugging the hole in a bucket whose bottom has rusted out.
Instead of paying one star 20 million for a picture why not pay 200 actors 100,000 for several movies? Duh cuz that would make sense...[well not for the self-centered power-tripping millionaire fake people].
Because then you would have to make several movies for the same box-office take. Hollywood has no incentive to make additional moves if additional advertising will bring in more revenue for less investment.
The print world, where there are over a million titles in print, and something that ships 10,000 copies isn't a great sell, but will at least keep the publisher interested in the author's next project, is one end of the media spectrum.
The movies, where there are a few tens of films in general circulation at any given time, is at the other.
Music is somewhere in between, and is likely to remain somewhere in between.
Computer games could be about where music is, but have taken a very Hollywood-ward turn over the last decade.
But in all cases, the consumer gets what they pay for.
OPEC is happy when oil is around the $35 per barrel range. It's not so expensive that they get slammed in the press, and not so cheap that they make no money
And, if the price of oil is going to be stable at $45 for a few years, brewing your own from coal or biomass starts to look a lot more interesting.
Fermi's paradox concerns me... if intelligent life is more common than 1 species / galaxy / Gyr or so, and this is feasible, then someone else ought to have already done it.
Unless we are the descendents of those who have already done it, or intelligent life is vanishingly rare, then we must conclude that galactic colonization is infeasible.
Perhaps the first ones to have the ability to do so declined to do so, but in doing so took measures so that no one else would.
At 60,000 feet, the flammability of hydrogren is a non-issue, because the pressure is too low to ignite hydrogen - air combustion, even with a spark.
Plus, hydrogen gives you a nifty way to provide night-time power: during the night, you use some of your lift gas to run a fuel cell, producing water. During the day, your solar cell regenerates the hydrogen via electrolysis. If there's enough water vapor at that height to bother collecting and condensing it, this even gives you a way to become self-sufficient in terms of station-keeping.
This is a great idea that's been around for a while. An aerostat with years-long station keeping abilities is a technically harder thing to engineer than an oribiting satellite, but once you figure out how, its infinitely cheaper to deploy.
The early exit polls also assigned more votes to Nader among late-deciding voters than he actually recieved from the entire electorate.
Exit polling becomes flawed when pollsters, whether deliberately or subconsciously, become selective about whom they poll. The accuracy of the poll is dependent on the pollsters sticking to a methodology that selects people coming from the polling place as accurately as possible. Take short cuts, and the poll becomes quickly flawed.
That was a worldwide depression, and it toppled half the governments of Europe.
At any rate, it appears that ITER is destined to be an expensive success. It will proabably achieve net energy production, but plants based on it would produce electricity at a cost that would make, well, just about any alternative energy source a preferable bet.
And how is that any different than the situation right now? Instead of the 10 most populous states, they run around to the 5 or 6 'swing' states.
And which states those are changes from election to election. Not all that fast, but which issues people perceive as important does change at a faster rate than population redistribution. A party cannot afford to blithely adopt a policy that significantly alienates a region of the country, because you never know whether it's that region whose votes will be crucial 12 years from now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm remember reading that 3/4 of the soldiers in WWI and WWII didn't aim at anything. They were conditioned to shoot at little bullseyes, not people. Notice how the military trains on human shaped targets now? Human-aim-fire-response.
The statistics I remember are that a full half of the infantry recruits in these wars didn't want to run the risk of killing anyone, and so fired over the enemy's heads. Another substantial fraction didn't mind killing the enemy, but didn't want to know about it if they did, and so fired in the general direction of the enemy without looking too hard to find out what the results were. Only something like 10-15% aimed their weapon at another human being and fired until he fell.
I don't know that silhouette training would help most of those people terribly much. One feature of a volunteer army, on the other hand, is it self-selects for people who at least initially think they are willing to kill.
Even so, a PBS show did a slot where they interviewed Gulf War fighter pilots, and it was amazing how many of them sincerely believed that for all the machinery and real estate they had blown up, they had caused no human casualties. They really believed that whoever was inside that plane or building got out, somehow.
Heck, if it's just a good look down you want to experience, high altitude ballooning would involve substantially less captial outlay, take you almost as high, and let you look down for substantially longer.
Unnecessary, because the income rate cancels out of the accounting equation. If the copyright isn't earning much, then it's not worth much, and so the term a drops out. The only variable is the interest rate, and given the lengths of time we're talking about here, it is probably fair to set that to an average of what the prime lending rate has been over the last umpteen years.
Read footnote 17 of the court's decision in Eldred. While they shy away from saying that the 99-year term marks the outer boundary of the "limited times," they do mention both it and another common law term, "lives in being plus 21 years" as worth taking into consideration when drawing the line between constitutionally acceptable times, and those that while limited in a dictionary sense are effectively perpetual times.
Then, the present value of the copyright is, and will remain, A/i, where i is the interest rate.
Meanwhile, at time t, the present value of the copyright they have already held is A/i * (exp[it] - 1).
So, at some time, it is fair to both the author and public to expire the copyright, because the present value of the copyright (that is being transferred from author to public) is equal to the present value of the copyright that the author has held in the past (that was given to the author by the public). This occurs when t = (ln 2)/i.
Then, the proper term of copyright depends on the interest rate, thusly:
In the US anyway, it will be a hard legal case to show that a term > 99 years is a "limited time" in a constitutional sense. Under the common law, there are a number of instances where the maximum length of time something can be leased, etc. is 99 years, because a longer term would be indistinguishable from outright sale.
Disney. Song of the the South. Also much of their WWII-era propoganda stuff. Now all-but-buried because it has become politically embarrassing.
My understanding is that it requires an absolute majority (a majority of the total number of seats in the Parliament rather than of the number of votes actually cast).
Is the European Parliament known for large numbers of MEPs not bothering to show up to vote?
Yes, but even in states where employers can fire for no reason at all, there are reasons for which they cannot fire.
U.S consumer costs for electric power are in the ballpark of 5 c / kWhr. More in some places, less if you landed on the good side of deregulation.
If these suits are actually against end-users, it is a major change in **AA strategy, and potentially a risky one.
In the world of print, which is what the law was written for in the first place and where it is most clear what is legal and what isn't, if Joe's Pirate Press publishes an unauthorized edition of the latest bestseller, they have infringed the copyright, but I am in the clear if I buy from Joe, because copyright restricts reproduction and publication, not possession.
On the internet, things are less clear, because if I download from Joe's FTP, it is not exactly clear who has made the copy. Sure, I requested it, but it was Joe who sent the bits my way. Joe could have sent me the bits even if I hadn't requested them. I don't know of any relevant case law, but a case exists to be made that the downloader of a file is in the same position as the purchaser of a book.
The one thing the **AA's don't want is for such a case to actually make it to court and risk setting a precedent that the downloader is legally in the clear, and only the party that offers the file for download infringes.
For the perlexed, here's how this works.
Roughly speaking, the EU has a bicameral legislature, with the two houses being the Parliament and the Council. However, neither one of those bodies can introduce legislation; rather, legislation begins with a third body, the Commission.
Now, European regulations ostensibly do not permit the patenting of a computer program, as such. However, the European Patent Office, has for a while now been interpreting those regulations differently than you or I would, and issuing software patents anyway. However, such patents have not held up in court.
So the Commission drafts a new patent directive that would explicitly permit software patents that had some "technical effect," a term broad enough to encompass just about anything.
The draft directive next goes to the Parliament, where it gets severely amended, such that it would exclude most software patents.
The amended directive then goes to the Council, where it is re-amended to resemble the original version. And then something weird happens. While the pro-patent contingent got its act together long enough to amend the directive, it never got around to voting to send the amended version back to Parliament, and then, it was unclear whether they had a majority in Council anymore, and then, Council went on break.
If the Council ever gets around to sending its version back to Parliament, Parliament will have to scrape together an absolute majority (rather than the qualified majority they needed to have to amend it in the first place) to either reject or further confuse the process. If they prove unable to do so within 3 (or 4, if they vote themselves a further delay) months (a distinct possibility), then the directive comes into force, and all the various national legislatures are supposed to harmonize their laws with the directive.
And the brown dwarfs are the problem: A 20 Jupiter ball of gas that condensed in a stellar nursery is a brown dwarf, but what about a 20 Jupiter ball of gas that that accreted in orbit around a star, and moreover, how do you even tell the difference?
If the US wanted to have a lower copyright term without renouncing Berne, they could adopt the approach Montana took with respect to the 55 mph national speed limit: The term of Copyright is life + 50. However, after the first 56 years have elapsed, infringment carries a maximum penalty of a $1 fine.
If Thomas Kuhn is right, then scientific revolution only really takes place when the senior scientists who are invested in the old paradigm die or retire. (A good example in this century is the very slow acceptance of plate tectonics as even a theory to be taken seriously.)
It may be that immortality is the last great scientific advance to be achieved.
The open * movement cannot accurately be called either capitalist or communist. It more accurately fits what was in the early 20th century been called distributism. Essentially, the idea was (and is, again) that a economic unit large enough to sway the market singlehandedly, whether a for-profit organization or a state bureau, will not actually succeed in serving the public interest. In other words, beyond a certain point, the private motives of those who manage large economic interests prevent potential economies of scale from actually being realized by the public.
A good starting treatise for the would-be distributist is G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World .
Except that pirated movie files, by and large, don't come from copied DVD's. They usually come from movie industry insiders and movie theater employees. Even if a DVD copy-protection system works, for the movie industry, it's like plugging the hole in a bucket whose bottom has rusted out.
Instead of paying one star 20 million for a picture why not pay 200 actors 100,000 for several movies? Duh cuz that would make sense...[well not for the self-centered power-tripping millionaire fake people].
Because then you would have to make several movies for the same box-office take. Hollywood has no incentive to make additional moves if additional advertising will bring in more revenue for less investment.
The print world, where there are over a million titles in print, and something that ships 10,000 copies isn't a great sell, but will at least keep the publisher interested in the author's next project, is one end of the media spectrum.
The movies, where there are a few tens of films in general circulation at any given time, is at the other.
Music is somewhere in between, and is likely to remain somewhere in between.
Computer games could be about where music is, but have taken a very Hollywood-ward turn over the last decade.
But in all cases, the consumer gets what they pay for.
OPEC is happy when oil is around the $35 per barrel range. It's not so expensive that they get slammed in the press, and not so cheap that they make no money
And, if the price of oil is going to be stable at $45 for a few years, brewing your own from coal or biomass starts to look a lot more interesting.
Fermi's paradox concerns me ... if intelligent life is more common than 1 species / galaxy / Gyr or so, and this is feasible, then someone else ought to have already done it.
Unless we are the descendents of those who have already done it, or intelligent life is vanishingly rare, then we must conclude that galactic colonization is infeasible.
Perhaps the first ones to have the ability to do so declined to do so, but in doing so took measures so that no one else would.
At 60,000 feet, the flammability of hydrogren is a non-issue, because the pressure is too low to ignite hydrogen - air combustion, even with a spark. Plus, hydrogen gives you a nifty way to provide night-time power: during the night, you use some of your lift gas to run a fuel cell, producing water. During the day, your solar cell regenerates the hydrogen via electrolysis. If there's enough water vapor at that height to bother collecting and condensing it, this even gives you a way to become self-sufficient in terms of station-keeping. This is a great idea that's been around for a while. An aerostat with years-long station keeping abilities is a technically harder thing to engineer than an oribiting satellite, but once you figure out how, its infinitely cheaper to deploy.
We have a runoff voting system. It's just that the first round is held in the court of public opinion.
The early exit polls also assigned more votes to Nader among late-deciding voters than he actually recieved from the entire electorate. Exit polling becomes flawed when pollsters, whether deliberately or subconsciously, become selective about whom they poll. The accuracy of the poll is dependent on the pollsters sticking to a methodology that selects people coming from the polling place as accurately as possible. Take short cuts, and the poll becomes quickly flawed.
That was a worldwide depression, and it toppled half the governments of Europe. At any rate, it appears that ITER is destined to be an expensive success. It will proabably achieve net energy production, but plants based on it would produce electricity at a cost that would make, well, just about any alternative energy source a preferable bet.
And how is that any different than the situation right now? Instead of the 10 most populous states, they run around to the 5 or 6 'swing' states. And which states those are changes from election to election. Not all that fast, but which issues people perceive as important does change at a faster rate than population redistribution. A party cannot afford to blithely adopt a policy that significantly alienates a region of the country, because you never know whether it's that region whose votes will be crucial 12 years from now.