the Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright retroactively, including onto those titles that had already fallen into the public domain.
No, it didn't. You're confusing it with URAA, which only returned works which were published outside the US by foreign authors. And in all fairness, they got screwed by the American laws that were in effect at the time.
other posters have proved the issue with statistics from freshmeat and sourceforge
They've given a data point, not a proof. My guess would be that the fact that Java is very popular on Sourceforge and Freshmeat, but about 0.5% on RedHat (and less on the Debian survey, but the age of the Debian source count could account for part of that), would be that people learn Java in college and run out and write programs in it, but the people who write the programs people actually use tend to still write them in C and C++, or at least haven't started rewriting old programs in Java.
Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%).
The latest complete count of a Linux distribution was of RedHat 7.1, http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/. Shell, Lisp and Assembly all beat out Perl, and Fortran is also above Python, then TCL and then Java. So Java's tenth, with a half percent of code, and there's a lot more variety than you would imply.
In case you didn't notice, passing functions as arguments does not make the worlds most legible / maintainable code
I think a lot of people didn't notice. Given an IntegrateRtoR(foo) function, what type do you expect foo to have? What's wrong with a function Apply (function, list), that applies a function to every element of the list and returns the resulting list? If you want to change list to be a tree or an array, you just have to add a function Apply (function, tree) instead of changing every place in the code where you would use Apply.
You've gotta love living in a country where teaching 4th graders morality will put you in front of a judge
They've never outlawed teaching morality. They've outlawed the teaching of religion by public school teachers. Religion and morality aren't necessarily connected. Furthermore, if you want to teach 4th graders religion, go ahead and do so in a private school that's paid for by people who agree with you.
I guess the operator is just looking at it from behind the console,
What do you expect the operator to see? Radiation is invisible; you could easily not tell if the machine was still spitting out radiation or not. You can also overload on radiation quickly; by the time the operator notices what's going on, it may be too late.
Just as importantly, there should always be multiple lines of protection. Trusting the operator to handle the problems when the machine screws up is a bad thing; the operator may have stepped out for a smoke break, be thinking about her golf game, or have a stroke. It may be one in a million, but with half a million people needing four or five sessions every year, that's several needless deaths a year.
It just shows that Castro (his government) cares about children and actually does something for them. Meanwhile the US government (and the President) prefer empty rhetoric about leaving no children behind without funding or any actions.
Give me a break. Children can not live on milk alone. The US government, mainly the states as is appropriate in a federal system, gives out millions in food stamps and welfare. Both societies obviously care about the children; a serious comparison of the two is probably worth a dissertion or at least a term paper.
(BTW, the second article above points out that the free milk is only to age 6.)
The amount of watching of educational TV depends on how much programming is produced.
There's tons of educational TV being produced, for schools and private purchase. Furthermore, it's cheaper to make an educational video; there's no million dollars being given away at the end of the night. There is no problem in supply.
College courses are education, not edutainment, even when they are designed for TV.
People who want education can find educational material. People who watch "Who Wants to Marry My Dad" don't want to watching education instead.
In any case, why are they college courses? A college course without interactivity, a book, homework or tests isn't really a course. You don't learn nearly as well passively, especially if it's material that's not going to be on the test.
TV is just a medium.
Mediums have strong points and connotations. There's a much more limited selection on TV than in even a small library; it's slow and harder to replay (frequently necessary in the learning process) than a book; and it's understood as a tool for entertainment, not education.
The fact that the US government prefers people watching 4 hours of entertainment per day is just sad.
The US government does not control what is on TV or what people watch. In a capitalistic, democratic society, there's no need for them to. People watch 4 hours of entertainment every day because they want to.
Showing educational courses on TV is one of the most efficient investments in education that you can make
What an assertion! Of course, without evidence, its value in this debate is zero.
average class is 30 children in the US and 20 children in Cuba.
And why doesn't Cuba spend that money on more TV programs?
less children drop out of school in Cuba, proving that the state cares about the children
Everyone cares about the children. It's been drilled into our essence during hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
For one thing, the US's population has a large transiant immigrant population. And students who don't stay in one school for long have a hard time graduating.
You want to toss a few unverified facts out and come to a dramatic conclusion about the US government. It just doesn't work that way in real life.
the facts are that a very significant (i.e. huge) number of American kids are undernourished.
What is "significant" or "huge"? Short of actual numbers, I'm forced to dismiss that as meaningless.
There will be a certain number of undernourished kids, children of poor families who don't trust the government, children of mentally-ill or drug-addicted parents, and children of parents with bizarre nutritional beliefs. The government giving out free food can't change that a bit.
Not to mention that another large group is overweight.
And giving out free milk helps that... how? This is a red herring; it has nothing to do with the give away of free milk, nor the differences between Cuba and the US.
educational TV is very much supply-driven. [...] softcore-porn reality shows, stupid talk-shows and shows about mobsters attract people much easier.
So it's demand-driven, as I said. Supply-driven would mean it is about the making, not the selling.
This is simply false. In countries where there are quality college (or other level) courses on TV, people do use them to study. Of course, these are not just filmed college lectures, but special TV courses that try to use the advantages of the media.
That is a horse of a slightly different color. How does this differ from the History Channel and Discovery Channel and the like that most Americans get on cable?
if PBS is good, than public television must obviously be excellent.
I don't watch PBS. I don't use the TV to learn; I use a TV to be entertained. Many of my fellow Americans agree. You can't replace the rest of the stations in a free country, and then it will be in competition with all the other stations. Perhaps more public television should be created for those who will watch it. But I don't believe that's an effiecent use of money that could be spent on libraries or schools.
about 10 percent of teens in the US are not attending school,
It's off-topic. I wish people could discuss these subjects without going off on a diatribe about America.
do all American children get free milk until they are six?
Effectively yes. Children don't pay for anything, and milk is not a high-price commodity for most American parents. There is a wealth of welfare programs and food stamp programs for any one who might have a problem paying for milk.
Do they get free college courses on television?
There's always PBS. The US has a lot of scholarship programs and federal funding to get anyone who really cares to college.
In reality, college courses build on each other and each lecture builds on the last. They build on books and graded homework. The number of people who would actually watch and gain something from college courses on TV is minimal. Frankly, if you want to teach on TV, you should use the advantages of TV; use video and audio for first-hand sources, reconstructions and interviews with people who were there, and don't depend on a book or other supplemental material.
One good part of a capitalist society is that college courses won't be shown on TV if nobody is going to watch. There's one or two channels on digital cable or satillite that show college courses, but not on basic cable or wireless. It would be cheap to film college classes and air them, but people aren't going to watch them.
But what is really amazing to me is the group responsible for the actual indoctrination and re-education of the masses.
People of every viewpoint try and sometimes succeed to indoctrinate and reeducate the masses. That's how cultures change.
It seems that if you don't think and act like the hive mind on the left
The "hive mind"? Give me a break. There are thousands of groups on the left, each with a different agenda and beliefs. One could equally paint the Moral Majority and friends as a hive mind.
For those that do not follow these PC rules...you will be branded a harbinger of hate and a bigot.
And if you believe that people should follow these PC rules and not the rules of the right wing, you're considered Big Brother.
(This in response to a lawsuit brought against a police department).
Because they didn't feel it would be good for thousands of people to start suing police departments. As to what police departments do, it is irrelevant; as to what they are supposted to do, I doubt there are many city councils or police departments that even noticed it. It isn't a justification to take the law into your own hands.
Does it ever bother you that the parts of the country with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest crime rates? Washington DC and nearby Virginia are a classic example.
Correlation does not imply causation. Washington DC also has a higher population density and more poor people than nearby Virginia does. If you want to avoid crime, go where it's cold; the Northwest Territories (Canada), Alaska, and especially Antartica have very little crime.
you could always count on Our Hero (tm) to blow away the Bad Guy(tm) who was threatening a woman.
So another moral of these TV shows was that women are helpless little things?
"the Law" and "Right" are NOT tied together
Neither is "what you think is right" and "Right". A vigilante is a danger to everyone, and it is a good thing that these TV shows remind us that vigilantes often kill inoccent people.
It's easy to bitch about human-made systems; we aren't perfect. But the idea of everyone carrying around a gun and killing any one who commits a crime is much more scary then the problems of the police.
Give me a break. First place, I wasn't writing a dissertion on the morals of modern police shows; I was summerizing a dozen shows and hundreds of episodes into one line. Yes, it's more complex than that; the TV shows do portray that.
Second place, the police are trained to uphold the law and put aside their agendas. While police sometimes have agendas, there's lots of gay people, blacks, people of the wrong religion, etc., that have discovered that ordinary people often have agendas too.
If you're going to go and commit a violent crime in front of me, I'm going to at least consider stopping it.
you see what 'land rights' are, how to deal with squatters, and other problems.. You shoot em.
Those aren't violent crimes. As for stopping violent crimes, there's a difference between stopping a crime you are at the scene, and shooting a man because you don't like how his trial is going.
Claiming that 'good hackers like language X' misses the whole point. Good hackers will use the best tool for the job.
Maybe, but most of a Linux distribution is written in C, C++, Perl and Shell because that's what the programmers are used to. Even stuff that should use Prolog don't, because it's not taught in schools and most hackers aren't familar with it.
but someone who stands up for what they believe in.
By shooting the people who disagree. Great.
Tell me that "YOURE FIRED", Big Brother, or some other tipe show on now has anything worth listening?
How about the fact that they can deal with things in a civilized manner? There are a bunch of law shows that tells us that vigilante justice is not the way to go and that it frequently hits the wrong person, that right will win in the end if you let the law handle it.
But that's not an encyclopedia's job. An encyclopedia's job is factual information. Whether or not something is a right or whether it's murder is purely opinion; there's no objective test to distinguish the two.
The number of people qualified to review any given wiki entry is very likely to be very low compared to the number of people who can review code.
I doubt that. Absolutely anyone can get a book and check the information with the article. The number of people who are familiar with any given subject at the shallow level of an encyclopedia article is huge.
Reviewing code is an ardous slow process, compared to reading over an encyclopedia article, it takes being able to program and often requires reading the entire program instead of just one article.
There's plenty of well water in Las Vegas, too. But no source of well water in a desert is going to survive millions of people drawing on it for centuries.
Political satire now has to be hosted outside the US because of stupid laws.
What makes you think it will be any easier outside the US? Remember, it was the Netherlands that ruled against Lindows; the US court tended to favor Lindows.
The copyright on this song should have expired years ago. I hope Congress is proud of itself.
The US Congress is not alone in this. For many years, American copyright laws were much looser and shorter than many European nations. Even now, Columbia and Mexico have longer copyright terms than the US, and most of Europe has the same terms. For new books; when we extended the copyright law, we left the public domain books where they were, whereas Europe generally put them back under copyright if they would be under the new law.
copyright is currently life+75, which means something written in 1918 could easily stay out of the public domain for a number of decades.
Not exactly. I know of nowhere that copyright is life+75; life+70 is the general standard, although Mexico is life+100, Canada and Australia is life+50, and many of the less industralized countries have shorter terms.
More to the point, the US is not life+70; it's life+70 for works published after 1978, with a few exceptions. Works published before 1923 lapsed into the public domain under the old law and weren't returned to copyright, and works published before 1978 are a straight 95 years, except for the American works that fell into the public domain for one reason or another.
they interviewed the DOE director and he had plenty of chance to present his side of it.
Right. If he presented a signed affadavit from God that this was safe, they would just edit it out and go on with the story. Just because the opposition gets a few heavily-edited sound bites in, doesn't mean that it's unbiased.
Slashdot Mirror
the Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended copyright retroactively, including onto those titles that had already fallen into the public domain.
No, it didn't. You're confusing it with URAA, which only returned works which were published outside the US by foreign authors. And in all fairness, they got screwed by the American laws that were in effect at the time.
other posters have proved the issue with statistics from freshmeat and sourceforge
They've given a data point, not a proof. My guess would be that the fact that Java is very popular on Sourceforge and Freshmeat, but about 0.5% on RedHat (and less on the Debian survey, but the age of the Debian source count could account for part of that), would be that people learn Java in college and run out and write programs in it, but the people who write the programs people actually use tend to still write them in C and C++, or at least haven't started rewriting old programs in Java.
Free software is written in C (65%), C++ (25%), and Python and Perl (all but the last 1%).
The latest complete count of a Linux distribution was of RedHat 7.1, http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/. Shell, Lisp and Assembly all beat out Perl, and Fortran is also above Python, then TCL and then Java. So Java's tenth, with a half percent of code, and there's a lot more variety than you would imply.
In case you didn't notice, passing functions as arguments does not make the worlds most legible / maintainable code
I think a lot of people didn't notice. Given an IntegrateRtoR(foo) function, what type do you expect foo to have? What's wrong with a function Apply (function, list), that applies a function to every element of the list and returns the resulting list? If you want to change list to be a tree or an array, you just have to add a function Apply (function, tree) instead of changing every place in the code where you would use Apply.
You've gotta love living in a country where teaching 4th graders morality will put you in front of a judge
They've never outlawed teaching morality. They've outlawed the teaching of religion by public school teachers. Religion and morality aren't necessarily connected. Furthermore, if you want to teach 4th graders religion, go ahead and do so in a private school that's paid for by people who agree with you.
I guess the operator is just looking at it from behind the console,
What do you expect the operator to see? Radiation is invisible; you could easily not tell if the machine was still spitting out radiation or not. You can also overload on radiation quickly; by the time the operator notices what's going on, it may be too late.
Just as importantly, there should always be multiple lines of protection. Trusting the operator to handle the problems when the machine screws up is a bad thing; the operator may have stepped out for a smoke break, be thinking about her golf game, or have a stroke. It may be one in a million, but with half a million people needing four or five sessions every year, that's several needless deaths a year.
Of course, there is always an explanation for that, because USA is the best, but when one child dies in Cuba that's because of evil Castro.
t ml give figures of 23% and 30+% for the number malnurished children in Cuba.
Except for some people, for whom it's the exact opposite. Stop painting things in extreme; real life is shades of grey.
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y01/jul01/26e4.htm and
http://members.allstream.net/~dchris/CubaFAQ111.h
It just shows that Castro (his government) cares about children and actually does something for them. Meanwhile the US government (and the President) prefer empty rhetoric about leaving no children behind without funding or any actions.
Give me a break. Children can not live on milk alone. The US government, mainly the states as is appropriate in a federal system, gives out millions in food stamps and welfare. Both societies obviously care about the children; a serious comparison of the two is probably worth a dissertion or at least a term paper.
(BTW, the second article above points out that the free milk is only to age 6.)
The amount of watching of educational TV depends on how much programming is produced.
There's tons of educational TV being produced, for schools and private purchase. Furthermore, it's cheaper to make an educational video; there's no million dollars being given away at the end of the night. There is no problem in supply.
College courses are education, not edutainment, even when they are designed for TV.
People who want education can find educational material. People who watch "Who Wants to Marry My Dad" don't want to watching education instead.
In any case, why are they college courses? A college course without interactivity, a book, homework or tests isn't really a course. You don't learn nearly as well passively, especially if it's material that's not going to be on the test.
TV is just a medium.
Mediums have strong points and connotations. There's a much more limited selection on TV than in even a small library; it's slow and harder to replay (frequently necessary in the learning process) than a book; and it's understood as a tool for entertainment, not education.
The fact that the US government prefers people watching 4 hours of entertainment per day is just sad.
The US government does not control what is on TV or what people watch. In a capitalistic, democratic society, there's no need for them to. People watch 4 hours of entertainment every day because they want to.
Showing educational courses on TV is one of the most efficient investments in education that you can make
What an assertion! Of course, without evidence, its value in this debate is zero.
average class is 30 children in the US and 20 children in Cuba.
And why doesn't Cuba spend that money on more TV programs?
less children drop out of school in Cuba, proving that the state cares about the children
Everyone cares about the children. It's been drilled into our essence during hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
For one thing, the US's population has a large transiant immigrant population. And students who don't stay in one school for long have a hard time graduating.
You want to toss a few unverified facts out and come to a dramatic conclusion about the US government. It just doesn't work that way in real life.
the facts are that a very significant (i.e. huge) number of American kids are undernourished.
... how? This is a red herring; it has nothing to do with the give away of free milk, nor the differences between Cuba and the US.
What is "significant" or "huge"? Short of actual numbers, I'm forced to dismiss that as meaningless.
There will be a certain number of undernourished kids, children of poor families who don't trust the government, children of mentally-ill or drug-addicted parents, and children of parents with bizarre nutritional beliefs. The government giving out free food can't change that a bit.
Not to mention that another large group is overweight.
And giving out free milk helps that
educational TV is very much supply-driven. [...] softcore-porn reality shows, stupid talk-shows and shows about mobsters attract people much easier.
So it's demand-driven, as I said. Supply-driven would mean it is about the making, not the selling.
This is simply false. In countries where there are quality college (or other level) courses on TV, people do use them to study. Of course, these are not just filmed college lectures, but special TV courses that try to use the advantages of the media.
That is a horse of a slightly different color. How does this differ from the History Channel and Discovery Channel and the like that most Americans get on cable?
if PBS is good, than public television must obviously be excellent.
I don't watch PBS. I don't use the TV to learn; I use a TV to be entertained. Many of my fellow Americans agree. You can't replace the rest of the stations in a free country, and then it will be in competition with all the other stations. Perhaps more public television should be created for those who will watch it. But I don't believe that's an effiecent use of money that could be spent on libraries or schools.
about 10 percent of teens in the US are not attending school,
It's off-topic. I wish people could discuss these subjects without going off on a diatribe about America.
do all American children get free milk until they are six?
Effectively yes. Children don't pay for anything, and milk is not a high-price commodity for most American parents. There is a wealth of welfare programs and food stamp programs for any one who might have a problem paying for milk.
Do they get free college courses on television?
There's always PBS. The US has a lot of scholarship programs and federal funding to get anyone who really cares to college.
In reality, college courses build on each other and each lecture builds on the last. They build on books and graded homework. The number of people who would actually watch and gain something from college courses on TV is minimal. Frankly, if you want to teach on TV, you should use the advantages of TV; use video and audio for first-hand sources, reconstructions and interviews with people who were there, and don't depend on a book or other supplemental material.
One good part of a capitalist society is that college courses won't be shown on TV if nobody is going to watch. There's one or two channels on digital cable or satillite that show college courses, but not on basic cable or wireless. It would be cheap to film college classes and air them, but people aren't going to watch them.
But what is really amazing to me is the group responsible for the actual indoctrination and re-education of the masses.
People of every viewpoint try and sometimes succeed to indoctrinate and reeducate the masses. That's how cultures change.
It seems that if you don't think and act like the hive mind on the left
The "hive mind"? Give me a break. There are thousands of groups on the left, each with a different agenda and beliefs. One could equally paint the Moral Majority and friends as a hive mind.
For those that do not follow these PC rules...you will be branded a harbinger of hate and a bigot.
And if you believe that people should follow these PC rules and not the rules of the right wing, you're considered Big Brother.
(This in response to a lawsuit brought against a police department).
Because they didn't feel it would be good for thousands of people to start suing police departments. As to what police departments do, it is irrelevant; as to what they are supposted to do, I doubt there are many city councils or police departments that even noticed it. It isn't a justification to take the law into your own hands.
Does it ever bother you that the parts of the country with the highest gun ownership rates tend to have the lowest crime rates? Washington DC and nearby Virginia are a classic example.
Correlation does not imply causation. Washington DC also has a higher population density and more poor people than nearby Virginia does. If you want to avoid crime, go where it's cold; the Northwest Territories (Canada), Alaska, and especially Antartica have very little crime.
you could always count on Our Hero (tm) to blow away the Bad Guy(tm) who was threatening a woman.
So another moral of these TV shows was that women are helpless little things?
"the Law" and "Right" are NOT tied together
Neither is "what you think is right" and "Right". A vigilante is a danger to everyone, and it is a good thing that these TV shows remind us that vigilantes often kill inoccent people.
It's easy to bitch about human-made systems; we aren't perfect. But the idea of everyone carrying around a gun and killing any one who commits a crime is much more scary then the problems of the police.
it can't protect you either, according to the US Supremes
Okay, it makes sense that a paranoid person would trust his gun over the police. Remember to wear your tin-foil.
Sure. The police never have an agenda.
Give me a break. First place, I wasn't writing a dissertion on the morals of modern police shows; I was summerizing a dozen shows and hundreds of episodes into one line. Yes, it's more complex than that; the TV shows do portray that.
Second place, the police are trained to uphold the law and put aside their agendas. While police sometimes have agendas, there's lots of gay people, blacks, people of the wrong religion, etc., that have discovered that ordinary people often have agendas too.
If you're going to go and commit a violent crime in front of me, I'm going to at least consider stopping it.
you see what 'land rights' are, how to deal with squatters, and other problems.. You shoot em.
Those aren't violent crimes. As for stopping violent crimes, there's a difference between stopping a crime you are at the scene, and shooting a man because you don't like how his trial is going.
Claiming that 'good hackers like language X' misses the whole point. Good hackers will use the best tool for the job.
Maybe, but most of a Linux distribution is written in C, C++, Perl and Shell because that's what the programmers are used to. Even stuff that should use Prolog don't, because it's not taught in schools and most hackers aren't familar with it.
but someone who stands up for what they believe in.
By shooting the people who disagree. Great.
Tell me that "YOURE FIRED", Big Brother, or some other tipe show on now has anything worth listening?
How about the fact that they can deal with things in a civilized manner? There are a bunch of law shows that tells us that vigilante justice is not the way to go and that it frequently hits the wrong person, that right will win in the end if you let the law handle it.
But that's not an encyclopedia's job. An encyclopedia's job is factual information. Whether or not something is a right or whether it's murder is purely opinion; there's no objective test to distinguish the two.
The number of people qualified to review any given wiki entry is very likely to be very low compared to the number of people who can review code.
I doubt that. Absolutely anyone can get a book and check the information with the article. The number of people who are familiar with any given subject at the shallow level of an encyclopedia article is huge.
Reviewing code is an ardous slow process, compared to reading over an encyclopedia article, it takes being able to program and often requires reading the entire program instead of just one article.
you're thinking of las vegas
there's plenty of well water here
There's plenty of well water in Las Vegas, too. But no source of well water in a desert is going to survive millions of people drawing on it for centuries.
Political satire now has to be hosted outside the US because of stupid laws.
What makes you think it will be any easier outside the US? Remember, it was the Netherlands that ruled against Lindows; the US court tended to favor Lindows.
The copyright on this song should have expired years ago. I hope Congress is proud of itself.
The US Congress is not alone in this. For many years, American copyright laws were much looser and shorter than many European nations. Even now, Columbia and Mexico have longer copyright terms than the US, and most of Europe has the same terms. For new books; when we extended the copyright law, we left the public domain books where they were, whereas Europe generally put them back under copyright if they would be under the new law.
So if your definition is correct, shouldn't Weird Al be getting sued lots?
Weird Al calls the artist, gets permission, and pays royalty checks.
copyright is currently life+75, which means something written in 1918 could easily stay out of the public domain for a number of decades.
Not exactly. I know of nowhere that copyright is life+75; life+70 is the general standard, although Mexico is life+100, Canada and Australia is life+50, and many of the less industralized countries have shorter terms.
More to the point, the US is not life+70; it's life+70 for works published after 1978, with a few exceptions. Works published before 1923 lapsed into the public domain under the old law and weren't returned to copyright, and works published before 1978 are a straight 95 years, except for the American works that fell into the public domain for one reason or another.
they interviewed the DOE director and he had plenty of chance to present his side of it.
Right. If he presented a signed affadavit from God that this was safe, they would just edit it out and go on with the story. Just because the opposition gets a few heavily-edited sound bites in, doesn't mean that it's unbiased.
Whatever the benefits of the technology, the culture of nuclear power is one of lies, coverup and other forms of deceit.
The culture of buisness is one of lies, coverup and other forms of deceit. Have your friendly oil and coal companies been any more honest?