That's the point. The distance between the two planets is small because the distance between the two planets positions is small...
But that's not what the sentence said. It said the physical distance is small because of the orbital positions (think angular positions on a model of the solar system, not x,y,z positions in space).
I guess it's redundant if you've fully internalized the relationships of spatial separation to orbital geometry, i.e. an astronomer might immediately realize that minimal E-M separation is implied by E at aphelion + M at perihelion + M at opposition, but it's hardly so obvious as to make it irrelevant to an lay essay explaining why Mars and Earth are close together.
As I said, I can believe I'm missing some subtlety by not reading the full text. Which of the links contains the actual text?
This special event takes place because of the specific positions of Mars and Earth in their orbits.
as
Mars will be the closest to Earth it's ever been, because Mars will be the closest to Earth it's ever been.
Am I missing something? That's not how the sentence reads to me. It says that the distance will be small because of a rare coincidence of the orbital positions of Mars and Earth, specifically Mars at perihelion and opposition simultaneously. In other words, the orbital geometry leads to a relatively small physical separation.
Of course, I couldn't find this at all in the basic post, so I assume it is in one of the linked items. Perhaps there is some additional context...
Was that for the absolutely sickening extortion because of the alleged floppy drive data corruption bug?
Yes. Can you fill me in on the "extortion" angle? I took it at face value at the time. i.e. I assumed because they had settled that there was legitimate knowledge and cover-up of the defect. Of course, in those days I knew a lot less about how the chumming system worked...
The people *never* get any sort of reasonable payout from these sorts of lawsuits
Don't be so sure. I got ~$300 in merchandise vouchers (third-party stuff, not just Toshiba hardware, though of course it came through their catalog so the actual "damages" to them were probably half that) from just such a settlement against Toshiba a few years back.
Please enumerate for me a set of dangerous consequences that can arise from this sort of tracking. As far as I'm concerned, if WDW learns that I gave up waiting in the 90 minute line at Splash Mountain to go have a turkey leg, and uses that to put a turkey leg stand in the middle of the SM line, it's been mutually beneficial. What exactly is it that you would buy at DisneyWorld (or presumably at the Disney Store) that you're concerned about them tracking? If you don't want to participate, use cash (I'll be the first in line at the protests if they ever try to outlaw that!)
What makes you think they aren't doing that already? Or that they wont? It's an obvious and trivial thing for them to do.
Of course it's obvious and trivial for people to link their databases to track purchase histories, etc. Grocery stores do it with loyalty cards. Amazon does it with your system account. These things are adding something for consumers, in effect training the system to respond better to their needs and expectations. So far I have seen nothing but consumer advantages from these approaches. Any time there's been a hint of abuse, e.g. Benneton's secret RFID tags, there has been a rightful, swift and strong consumer backlash. If that's the kind of diligence we need, then great. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm with you. WDW can't be beat for full-on mind-bending techno-overload fun. My daughter's getting one of these the next time we step through the gate.
OTOH, this being a Disney-related forum, you might have done better to open with:
"You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity.":-)
It just saddens me that there are so many people in this world that don't give a lick about privacy or security as long as they have some "added" feature (which they end up paying for).
I hope you aren't lumping me in that category, because I am extremely concerned about the potential for abuse in this area. I just don't see monitoring traffic patterns on private property in order to enhance the park for its visitors worthy of derision when there are so many legitimate targets.
Sorry bub, but that's not for me, and that's why I'm not going to go to Disney World anytime soon. If I ever did go, you better bet I'll be wearing my tin-foil hat... and gloves so they don't my DNA from my fingerprints fromaround Mickey's throat.:)
That's certainly your perogative. IMHO, WDW is one of the most technologically amazing pieces of entertainment on the planet, and I have no intention to give up my passes. One of the things I enjoy the most about it is the lack of tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiacs blathering on every corner.;-)
And more philosophically, if he goes on such a ride and falls out (into theme park no-mans land, where "no items are retrieved until the end of the day") will he ask you to make sure he's still there... even if he isn't there to ask?
No, but he screams in terror as he plummets to the ground...
But maybe people don't care if they're anonymous anymore... maybe they want a talking AI Mickey doll to tell them what to think... I know that I don't want that however.
Lighten up, dude. It's a freaking toy adding another layer of interactivity to a theme park, hardly more sinister than the 100 Years of Magic badges they had last year that would blink when you were near a parade, etc. As for their tracking you, Disney's imagineers are masters of queue control and optimization precisely because they put a tremendous amount of energy into studying how people move through their parks. Absent any evidence that the doll is correlated to an individual, e.g. by ticket or cc# used at purchase, I hardly consider extending those studies with this doll an invasion of privacy.
Sorry, but the GPL does not prevent 'forking,' as a matter of fact, it encourages them.
True enough, but I'll take OSS forks under a license that gives me all rights to modify as I see fit over binary forks that lock me out of the code and into the vendor any day of the week...
There was an interesting study published recently in the Communications of the ACM that examined, among other things, people's likelihood to download or purchase based on price points. One of the conclusions was that there would be a spike in sales if the price dropped (I know I for one would buy more, so long as the discs weren't crippled with bogus copy-protection). Nonetheless, there is a large number of people who see no reason to buy when they can get it for free. That is a powerful psychology to overcome.
Advertising is a popular and somewhat reasonable way to view P2P; the modern equivalent of friends trading tapes. The scale of the system turns it into something far beyond that in practice, though. In the past, people did not run thousands of tape copies and distribute them to strangers. Competition is exactly what it is. The problem is that it is an unfair (to the labels) form of competition because their is very little cost imposed on the P2P competitors...
Is this going to chase away companies adopting Linux for use with their products?
Companies that don't play by the rules shouldn't be using Linux, even if it costs us good driver support, etc. One of the benefits of using the GPL is that it provides a self-protection mechanism to ensure that Linux is not closed off and fragmented into opaque binary distros. If such fragmentation were allowed, you will see exactly the problems you had previously with commercial vendors appearing in Linux products, only multiplied.
One is a case where an extremely-low-cost way of doing business results in an extremely high cost for a large number of consumers. The second is a case where extremely-low-cost activity for consumers imposes a high cost on a business. That is the meaningful comparison.
Damn I hate the way the RIAA works. If they want to increase CD sales revenues, stop the pirate witch-hunt and use the money instead to:...
Sad reality: It is unlikely that charging less per album or paying artists more will do anything to affect the problem of "piracy" because there are plenty of people who will copy music for free just because they can. Ergo RIAA literally has no choice but to pursue infringers if they hope to preserve their business.
It just occured to me that the problem RIAA faces with widespread copying of their products is similar in a roles-reversed way to the spam problem for email users.
Because the cost of spam to the spammer is essentially 0 and the tech allows for massive mail distribution rates, you have a case where one user has to delete hundreds of spams a day, and as more spammers enter the market it scales up and up. The spammers pay next to nothing, and the recipients pay dearly, either with their time scanning and deleting the mail or by purchasing/configuring spam filtration tech.
In the RIAA case, RIAA pays to produce recordings and profits by controlling its distribution. Introduce millions of computer users paying essentially nothing to copy and redistribute their products, and now the industry loses their income potential.
Interesting implications for people who hate spammers with one breath and RIAA with the next...
... chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utangs out to other primates,... birds, reptiles, fish, then insects... single-celled organisms, with whom we still share an impressive number of genes.
All still much closer to us in any meaningful sense than even the most human-looking cyborb.
Emphasis added.
What's the basis for this claim? Cyborgs are genetic humans modified by technology.
Nicely said. I'm happy to see that your real views are better thought out than your initial post led me to believe. Please excuse the flaming, but I get very passionate when I see people making sweeping statements against copyright because it is fundamentally a tool for enforcing the will of the creator, whether that will is profit mongering or public good. For example, an RIAA "license" and the GPL are both copyright notices, they just place very different conditions on the user.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm pretty much an absolutist about the rights of the creator to specify the terms for their work's use, no matter how asenine those terms may be. As "consumers" of the works, our sole right is to accept or reject use of the work in accord with those terms. Of course, different standards should apply to public documents and the like and I'll defend anyone who argues for reductions in the terms of protection, which have gotten way out of hand and are completely incompatible with our accelerated culture.
A couple of your statements bear a little more scrutiny.
However, I still stand by my point that the thing we pay for is the service of seeing the movie in the way it was intended, ie in a theatre, with a crowd, on a big screen, with surround.
How can you say what the limits of intended use are? What about direct to video releases? Studios often plan movie budgets based on the total income potential including rentals and sales of consumer media. If they had to rely entirely on the box office, it would significantly change their business. Furthermore, there would be no incentive at all to release consumer media. They'd just recycle consistently marketable films to the big screen periodically (as Disney used to do in the days before home video, BTW).
I am disturbed by the trend of our society becomming more and more shaped by products (movies in this case) that define our culture, yet we cant "own" them. In the past, this was not always the case, the tales told were for the people, retold by the people and defined them. Not so much anymore. Thats probably the crux of what I am thinking.
This is a very insightful comment, and one I tend to agree with. Bear in mind that copyright protection is a pretty specific thing, and really doesn't overly inhibit the exchange and expansion of ideas per se, just copies or extremely close derivatives of fixed works. I am much more troubled by the inability to "own" the products in the sense of making legitimate use of them in my home. DVD region codes and copy-protected media infuriate me. We would have neither if it weren't for people "pirating" the works, which should give you some insight into my initial flamethrower blast at your earlier off-the-cuff remarks.:-)
Also, you should recognize that the storyteller and other folky traditions are still alive (Check your local public radio/TV community bulletin boards). They're just marginalized in our fast-paced, product-oriented culture.
I also want to remind you that ethical and legal are sseperate concepts.
That's why I listed them separately. Hopefully I've made some of the case for the ethical side of copyright protection.
This country was based on letting ideas be free. Heck Ben Franklin didnt even patent his inventions.
Ben Franklin was a great man and a far-thinking one, and his right to forgoe profit in order to benefit society is to be commended. Even if he had the same intentions, he would most likely have to patent those inventions today just to keep the sharks at bay, which is really sad. Again, the key thing is that copyright/patent protection allow you to control the use of your work, and without those protections, you would not be able to assert the use of your work for the public good any more than for your own profit.
So I guess my question is. How many people would be willing to pay for the creation of open-content?
Well, having observed the way things are going with non-open content, the cynicin me says very few relative to the ones who just want to get it for free because they can...
I am truly happy that you work in such a significant and socially responsible area. The world would definitely be a better place if more people were to follow your pattern. Nonetheless, your decision not to protect your work has nothing to do with copyright. If it is work for hire the copyright belongs to those who hire you and if you did it independently the copyright belongs to you automatically. If you choose not to avail yourself of this "right", so be it.
People who do chose to make their living by enforcing the copyrights on their work have every legal and ethical right to do so, and you cannot compare what you do as a hired-gun consultant to the work of an artist, label, or studio that finances their recordings themselves against hopes of their salesworthiness.
You explicity mentioned movies, so let's stick to that. Noone pays the studios to produce movies. They produce them hoping that they will be able to recoup expenses and profit at the box office, cable, DVD etc. If their product bombs they are out millions, but if it is successful they make money. How is your anticopyright position anything but thoroughly disrespectful of those who self-produce creative works with the intent to sell copies of them? Who are you to say that it is illegitimate for people to demand payment for their work?
Maybe you think the world would be a nicer place without the corporate media's backwash. That's an intriguing and defensible position, but the culture at large has voted with their wallets for Hollywood, for cable TV and for mass-marketed pop music. If you don't like it, don't buy it. What is this ridiculous sense of entitlement that you should freely enjoy the work of others without compensation?
Once again, your post shows you've spent your time really thinking about this and not just developing a knee-jerk abreaction to the recent abuses of the system by the content cartels and their congressional lapdogs. I agree that the system is seriously messed up and that the recent directions of extending protection intervals is completely the opposite of what we should be doing with our current accelerated, technological culture. If more people were so reasonable, we might actually get somewhere with copyright reform. Every gimme gimme gimme jackass out there "sharing" copyrighted works against the author's/owner's wishes is driving us further into the hands of the "intellectual property" police apparatus.
And yours is an opinion I can completely respect. What many people seem to fail to appreciate is that copyright is nothing more than a "right" to control what is done with your work, which includes distribution under GPL and other OSS licenses as well as mercenary nonsense like RIAA. It infuriates me to hear this blather from people who apparently think they are entitled to freely enjoy/use the work of others just because the creators fixed it in a medium that could be easily duplicated.
Interestingly, this "what do you do for a living?" thing is something of an experiment. I'm not sure what it reveals, but I have asked the question twice to people with vehement anti-copyright positions and have yet to receive a reply from the original poster. This thread is still relatively fresh, so that may change...
The person making the music, movie or whatever, is done. THey have made the piece, now its ours and thats that.
What do you do for a living?
I'm serious. I want to know what you do that you expect to profit from to the degree that you can keep comfortably yammering away at this anti-copyright mantra.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you are right, but my intent was to amuse, not to be insightful...
Damn those moderators.
You're half right...
But that's not what the sentence said. It said the physical distance is small because of the orbital positions (think angular positions on a model of the solar system, not x,y,z positions in space).
I guess it's redundant if you've fully internalized the relationships of spatial separation to orbital geometry, i.e. an astronomer might immediately realize that minimal E-M separation is implied by E at aphelion + M at perihelion + M at opposition, but it's hardly so obvious as to make it irrelevant to an lay essay explaining why Mars and Earth are close together.
As I said, I can believe I'm missing some subtlety by not reading the full text. Which of the links contains the actual text?
as
Am I missing something? That's not how the sentence reads to me. It says that the distance will be small because of a rare coincidence of the orbital positions of Mars and Earth, specifically Mars at perihelion and opposition simultaneously. In other words, the orbital geometry leads to a relatively small physical separation.
Of course, I couldn't find this at all in the basic post, so I assume it is in one of the linked items. Perhaps there is some additional context...
That depends on whether you're looking forward or back to count your lifetimes. It will be closer in 2287 than it is this time.
Yeah, the problem's with your keyboard.
Yes. Can you fill me in on the "extortion" angle? I took it at face value at the time. i.e. I assumed because they had settled that there was legitimate knowledge and cover-up of the defect. Of course, in those days I knew a lot less about how the chumming system worked...
Don't be so sure. I got ~$300 in merchandise vouchers (third-party stuff, not just Toshiba hardware, though of course it came through their catalog so the actual "damages" to them were probably half that) from just such a settlement against Toshiba a few years back.
Of course it's obvious and trivial for people to link their databases to track purchase histories, etc. Grocery stores do it with loyalty cards. Amazon does it with your system account. These things are adding something for consumers, in effect training the system to respond better to their needs and expectations. So far I have seen nothing but consumer advantages from these approaches. Any time there's been a hint of abuse, e.g. Benneton's secret RFID tags, there has been a rightful, swift and strong consumer backlash. If that's the kind of diligence we need, then great. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm with you. WDW can't be beat for full-on mind-bending techno-overload fun. My daughter's getting one of these the next time we step through the gate.
:-)
OTOH, this being a Disney-related forum, you might have done better to open with:
"You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity."
I hope you aren't lumping me in that category, because I am extremely concerned about the potential for abuse in this area. I just don't see monitoring traffic patterns on private property in order to enhance the park for its visitors worthy of derision when there are so many legitimate targets.
That's certainly your perogative. IMHO, WDW is one of the most technologically amazing pieces of entertainment on the planet, and I have no intention to give up my passes. One of the things I enjoy the most about it is the lack of tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiacs blathering on every corner.
No, but he screams in terror as he plummets to the ground...
Lighten up, dude. It's a freaking toy adding another layer of interactivity to a theme park, hardly more sinister than the 100 Years of Magic badges they had last year that would blink when you were near a parade, etc. As for their tracking you, Disney's imagineers are masters of queue control and optimization precisely because they put a tremendous amount of energy into studying how people move through their parks. Absent any evidence that the doll is correlated to an individual, e.g. by ticket or cc# used at purchase, I hardly consider extending those studies with this doll an invasion of privacy.
True enough, but I'll take OSS forks under a license that gives me all rights to modify as I see fit over binary forks that lock me out of the code and into the vendor any day of the week...
There was an interesting study published recently in the Communications of the ACM that examined, among other things, people's likelihood to download or purchase based on price points. One of the conclusions was that there would be a spike in sales if the price dropped (I know I for one would buy more, so long as the discs weren't crippled with bogus copy-protection). Nonetheless, there is a large number of people who see no reason to buy when they can get it for free. That is a powerful psychology to overcome.
Advertising is a popular and somewhat reasonable way to view P2P; the modern equivalent of friends trading tapes. The scale of the system turns it into something far beyond that in practice, though. In the past, people did not run thousands of tape copies and distribute them to strangers. Competition is exactly what it is. The problem is that it is an unfair (to the labels) form of competition because their is very little cost imposed on the P2P competitors...
Companies that don't play by the rules shouldn't be using Linux, even if it costs us good driver support, etc. One of the benefits of using the GPL is that it provides a self-protection mechanism to ensure that Linux is not closed off and fragmented into opaque binary distros. If such fragmentation were allowed, you will see exactly the problems you had previously with commercial vendors appearing in Linux products, only multiplied.
One is a case where an extremely-low-cost way of doing business results in an extremely high cost for a large number of consumers. The second is a case where extremely-low-cost activity for consumers imposes a high cost on a business. That is the meaningful comparison.
Sad reality: It is unlikely that charging less per album or paying artists more will do anything to affect the problem of "piracy" because there are plenty of people who will copy music for free just because they can. Ergo RIAA literally has no choice but to pursue infringers if they hope to preserve their business.
It just occured to me that the problem RIAA faces with widespread copying of their products is similar in a roles-reversed way to the spam problem for email users.
Because the cost of spam to the spammer is essentially 0 and the tech allows for massive mail distribution rates, you have a case where one user has to delete hundreds of spams a day, and as more spammers enter the market it scales up and up. The spammers pay next to nothing, and the recipients pay dearly, either with their time scanning and deleting the mail or by purchasing/configuring spam filtration tech.
In the RIAA case, RIAA pays to produce recordings and profits by controlling its distribution. Introduce millions of computer users paying essentially nothing to copy and redistribute their products, and now the industry loses their income potential.
Interesting implications for people who hate spammers with one breath and RIAA with the next...
Emphasis added.
What's the basis for this claim? Cyborgs are genetic humans modified by technology.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I'm pretty much an absolutist about the rights of the creator to specify the terms for their work's use, no matter how asenine those terms may be. As "consumers" of the works, our sole right is to accept or reject use of the work in accord with those terms. Of course, different standards should apply to public documents and the like and I'll defend anyone who argues for reductions in the terms of protection, which have gotten way out of hand and are completely incompatible with our accelerated culture.
A couple of your statements bear a little more scrutiny.
How can you say what the limits of intended use are? What about direct to video releases? Studios often plan movie budgets based on the total income potential including rentals and sales of consumer media. If they had to rely entirely on the box office, it would significantly change their business. Furthermore, there would be no incentive at all to release consumer media. They'd just recycle consistently marketable films to the big screen periodically (as Disney used to do in the days before home video, BTW).
This is a very insightful comment, and one I tend to agree with. Bear in mind that copyright protection is a pretty specific thing, and really doesn't overly inhibit the exchange and expansion of ideas per se, just copies or extremely close derivatives of fixed works. I am much more troubled by the inability to "own" the products in the sense of making legitimate use of them in my home. DVD region codes and copy-protected media infuriate me. We would have neither if it weren't for people "pirating" the works, which should give you some insight into my initial flamethrower blast at your earlier off-the-cuff remarks. :-)
Also, you should recognize that the storyteller and other folky traditions are still alive (Check your local public radio/TV community bulletin boards). They're just marginalized in our fast-paced, product-oriented culture.
That's why I listed them separately. Hopefully I've made some of the case for the ethical side of copyright protection.
Ben Franklin was a great man and a far-thinking one, and his right to forgoe profit in order to benefit society is to be commended. Even if he had the same intentions, he would most likely have to patent those inventions today just to keep the sharks at bay, which is really sad. Again, the key thing is that copyright/patent protection allow you to control the use of your work, and without those protections, you would not be able to assert the use of your work for the public good any more than for your own profit.
Well, having observed the way things are going with non-open content, the cynicin me says very few relative to the ones who just want to get it for free because they can...
I am truly happy that you work in such a significant and socially responsible area. The world would definitely be a better place if more people were to follow your pattern. Nonetheless, your decision not to protect your work has nothing to do with copyright. If it is work for hire the copyright belongs to those who hire you and if you did it independently the copyright belongs to you automatically. If you choose not to avail yourself of this "right", so be it.
People who do chose to make their living by enforcing the copyrights on their work have every legal and ethical right to do so, and you cannot compare what you do as a hired-gun consultant to the work of an artist, label, or studio that finances their recordings themselves against hopes of their salesworthiness.
You explicity mentioned movies, so let's stick to that. Noone pays the studios to produce movies. They produce them hoping that they will be able to recoup expenses and profit at the box office, cable, DVD etc. If their product bombs they are out millions, but if it is successful they make money. How is your anticopyright position anything but thoroughly disrespectful of those who self-produce creative works with the intent to sell copies of them? Who are you to say that it is illegitimate for people to demand payment for their work?
Maybe you think the world would be a nicer place without the corporate media's backwash. That's an intriguing and defensible position, but the culture at large has voted with their wallets for Hollywood, for cable TV and for mass-marketed pop music. If you don't like it, don't buy it. What is this ridiculous sense of entitlement that you should freely enjoy the work of others without compensation?
Once again, your post shows you've spent your time really thinking about this and not just developing a knee-jerk abreaction to the recent abuses of the system by the content cartels and their congressional lapdogs. I agree that the system is seriously messed up and that the recent directions of extending protection intervals is completely the opposite of what we should be doing with our current accelerated, technological culture. If more people were so reasonable, we might actually get somewhere with copyright reform. Every gimme gimme gimme jackass out there "sharing" copyrighted works against the author's/owner's wishes is driving us further into the hands of the "intellectual property" police apparatus.
And yours is an opinion I can completely respect. What many people seem to fail to appreciate is that copyright is nothing more than a "right" to control what is done with your work, which includes distribution under GPL and other OSS licenses as well as mercenary nonsense like RIAA. It infuriates me to hear this blather from people who apparently think they are entitled to freely enjoy/use the work of others just because the creators fixed it in a medium that could be easily duplicated.
Interestingly, this "what do you do for a living?" thing is something of an experiment. I'm not sure what it reveals, but I have asked the question twice to people with vehement anti-copyright positions and have yet to receive a reply from the original poster. This thread is still relatively fresh, so that may change...
What do you do for a living?
I'm serious. I want to know what you do that you expect to profit from to the degree that you can keep comfortably yammering away at this anti-copyright mantra.