Note that the OP said "every single" Few people would say that commercial duplication of your work is justified. However, if I find a neat image in a magazine and tack it to my wall, and one of my friends says "neat, can you scan that for me?" Should I have to track you down and give you a buck or two
No, but the technology we are talking about wouldn't prevent you from doing so. Though it defines the limit of "a few friends" as exactly 5 friends. Apparently this DRM scheme (whatever it's technical merits or likelyhood of success) isn't concerned with such informal and acceptable sharing. It is obviously intended to prevent you from sharing your music with an unlimited number of friends.
The difficulty is that current technology makes EVERYONE a potential publisher. Putting your ripped CD collection up on a P2P network isn't sharing with a few friends - it is sharing with a few thousand friends. Ripping a few thousand CD's for sale isn't THAT much more difficult and it is being done on a reasonably grand scale.
The argument from the "information wants to be free" side is that artists should freely distribute and give away their product and find some other way to profit from their art. The usual suggestion is live performances, that is something that could work with musicians but may be more difficult for for writers. I rather doubt that the lecture circuit is profitable enough for writers to make their living off of. Of course if the profit is in the lectures why bother with writing it down, that just devalues the lecture which is where the profit lies, at most books (being free) would reveal just enough to entice and audience for the lecture. a return to oral tradition would be interesting but I'm not sure it would count as "progress of the useful arts".
Copyright isn't there to create a market, it's there to add value to society.
Copyrights entire function IS to create a market and thereby add value to society. Without copyright law it would be impossible to make a living as an artist or author (or many other things). My personal example is not the best illustration of this, a writer or novelist is a better example. It is quite easy for competing publishers to buy one copy of a new book and then sell it as their own without compensating the author. This was the problem that led to the creation of copyright law in the first place and it is *exactly* the problem that is presented by P2P networks and easy CD duplication. Each person sharing his private collection with his 10,000 closest friends is in fact a "publisher" and is in direct competition with the artist (and his publisher) selling his work. It makes no difference that you aren't selling it, in fact it is *worse* - it is hard for the artist to compete with "free".
Fair use is perhaps the most important part of copyright law and it's getting ignored in the interests of using it as a buisness model
Fair use is not the central purpose of copyright law - it is the bundle of exceptions. Places where you CAN legitimately copy and even in limited ways distribute work without compensating the artist. "fair use" was largely carved out by courts providing for "fair" exceptions. Given the wholesale copyright violation that has been occasioned by new technologies that make it very easy for EVERY consumer to around and be a publisher without compensating the artist it is likely that those allowances for fair use that are routinely abused for things that were NEVER considered fair use that some fair use allowances will be restricted more than they were before.
That's the way it works. That's the way its *supposed* to work.
No, take a different example: an author. He sells his product to consumers who pay for books through the intermediary of a publisher. Copyright law means that you cannot buy his book and make unlimited copies to distribute - even if you distribute them for free. If you run your own copy through your copier for your own use, fine. If you make 10-10,000 copies to give away to all who ask - not fine. This is EXACTLY the case that copyright law was intended to prevent and is pretty much EXACTLY the case that the music industry is dealing with (poorly).
You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that musicians, artists and authors should give away the product of their work for free and make their living on live performances (concerts, lectures) but that is not the law or the thinking behind the law as it currently IS.
It's an interesting (but apparently little known) fact that the purpose of copyright law is not to generate money for copyright holders.
Well really it is. The purpose of copyright law is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" but the WAY that this progress is promoted is by.. (wait for it)... generating money for copyright holders(!)
You are right though that making money for the copyright holder is the MEANS to the end and not the end itself. Copyright law needs to be extensively reformed. The current time limit (70 years after the death of the artist) is FAR too long, so long that it is becoming a BARRIER to the "progress of useful arts"
The copyright holder does not need to be paid for every single copy that takes place,
No, they DO. I make my living as a "copyright holder" - I am an illustrator and a designer. I sell copyrights on my work to my clients, I have often had people "steal" my work, using it commercially without compensating me... my clients competitor is getting my work for free. Art for it's own sake may be a labor of love (product illustrations on the other hand never are) but I still need to eat (thus the product illustrations). When my clients competitors just use my work without compensating me, I'm sorry but that IS and SHOULD BE a crime.
There is a certain amount of hypocrisy here. If Microsoft just lifted GNU code wholesale and turned around and sold it without honoring the terms of the license there would be outrage. But why? doesn't information want to be free? Why can't they just do what they want with it freely (making their own alterations and selling the binary result for a profit)? Free software is only possible with Intellectual property law backing it up. You can give it away under CONDITIONS because you OWN it (at least for a time).
The passive tags on individual items have a range of about 3 meters.
There are active RF tags for larger things like containers, box cars, maybe down to palettes on the warehouse floor.
Re:The electricity still comes from fossil fuels!
on
Hybrid Fleet Vehicles
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· Score: 1
Don't tell anyone though; this horrible 'environmentalism' trend is hurting profits at great companies like Enron.
No Enron was a very "green" company. They were a natural gas company that slowly morphed into a kind of energy brokerage. They heavily pushed environmental legislation because a lot of it included schemes that involved a lot of brokering of energy between different entities which is what Enron did. Enron was the biggest (only?) corporate lobbying for passage the Kyoto treaty - and they lobbied heavily for it.
I think it is pretty obvious. They ARE (or rather, were) known for *GOOD* animated movies. Disney was a creative studio once upon a time - innovators of new technology and artistic storytellers that consistently produced compelling hit movies. It was the secret of their success and made them a powerhouse. They have been riding that initial success for the past 50 years with a brief pale renaissance in the 90's that is now over.
Today Pixar is what Disney was in the 40's and 50's: pioneers of a new medium that aren't so enthralled by that new medium itself that they forget that it is only the medium and that the real point, and beauty is in the story and artistry itself. Pixar has lifted Disney's original culture, it's methods and even it's jargon as Disney has lost them. If Walt were thawed out today he would feel quite at home at Pixar but lost and alienated (and very sad) over at Disney.
3D really has nothing to do with it. Pixar is NOT primarily successful due to it's CG animation skills. It is successful due to it's storytelling skills. THAT is what Pixar has and Disney lacks. To the degree that Disney thinks that 3D is the secret of Pixar's success Disney will fail.
Spoken like an MBA rather than a artist. The logical flaw is in point #3, and it's caused by the fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the word "franchise" in point number 4.
WHY are the Toy Store/Nemo/Monster "franchises" worth anything? Because the story was good, the movie was well crafted - In short because they are a work of art rather than a "franchise".
You CAN predict if future movies will be successful, if you have real talent at your disposal, and both the talent and the management see it as art and refuse to compromise it for short term profits you have very good odds of continuing to produce hits and valuable franchises. You will have the occasional flop but even the flops will often end up being long term successes years after their initial failure (like Fantasia) This attitude was what made Disney a success in the first place and what makes Pixar a success today.
If you view it as a "franchise" - a mere vehicle for merchandising and profits you have very good odds of producing a string of lackluster flops and of driving once valuable franchises into the ground This is what is happening at Disney today.
Disney will get two more hits out of Pixar, it will retain the rights to the Toy Story/Monsters/Nemo/Incredibles/Cars franchises which it will profit from immensely... But they can't create NEW franchises that will be similarly profitable, and they will run the franchises the DO have into the ground with crappy direct-to-video sequels. Pixar will go on to create new franchises from which it will keep all the profits, after a decade or so Pixar will be profiting from the new/fresh/latest franchises they created while Disney will still be hawking increasingly dated Woody dolls and Nemo plush toys.
Mexico is not a particularly poor country, by third world standards it's a model of economic growth. Moneterrey and Saltillo are both centers of economic activity. Still plop down rural mississippi in Mexico and they might not be centers of economic activity like Saltillo or Monterrey but they wouldn't stick out as being particularly poor (if those receiving it keep getting US welfare they'll be quite wealthy). As I said - worst case they fit right in. Plop them down in Oaxaca and they'll be an island of fabulous wealth.
Are you agreeing with me? Picking the very poorest geographic portion of the USA as your point of comparison pretty much makes my point. Rural mississippi, and a few other isolated pockets of extreme poverty DO get pretty close to third world standards - but then again rural mississippi is remarkable for it's poverty, it is NOT the USA as a whole but the very bottom end of it. Even at that we are leaving off with our very worst case right where much of the world is just getting started. Rural mississippi at it's absolute worst looks like the third world *on average* - NOT particularly poor. Plop it down in the middle of any third world nation and it would at worst fit right in, in most cases it would be hailed as an economic miracle. Compare it to a similarly benighted economic backwater in India (or any third-world nation) and there is simply no comparison.
If that distended belly is caused by beer rather than by Kwashiorkor you are doing OK by third world standards.
So, when reading this, did anyone else think that with the exception of the water supply issue, these are all applicable to the U.S. as well? Obviously not to the same degree, but still.
No.
I think the fact that a major health concern about the poor in America is obesity pretty much says everything that needs to be said about it. There is no real comparison between what we call "poverty" and what the rest of the world calls "poverty"
I've also seen otherwise intelligent people that readily adopt the stance that the people that disagree with them are mentally defective rather than actually engage them on the merits of their arguments.
It is quite possible that the truth of your position is NOT self-evident and that other intelligent people looking at the same body of facts have HONESTLY and INTELLIGENTLY arrived at different conclusions.
Did you ever try to only quote relevant snippets instead of blindly copying everything?
Sure. For instance when answering a list of questions or addressing a series of points in which case I'll usually have a short intro dealing with generalities and then quote -> response -> next quote -> next response, etc.
Ill' also strip out everything but the immediately preceding message in the thread. There is usually no reason to continue sending along the entire history of the conversation.
If i'm using email as a glorified chat program with very short questions & answers the quoted original goes at the top with my reply at the bottom. But in that case it is still easy enough with the default "top posting" to hit the down arrow a couple of times to put my insertion point at the bottom.
But usually I write so that the quoted text is not necessary to understand what I wrote. The original I'm responding to is attached at the bottom (if at all) merely as a reference. Frankly it's usually only included because that is what the software does by default. It's not necessary, I don't anticipate that the recipient will even read it. Presumable they already know what it says. BUT it is occasionally useful as a reference so it does no harm and potentially some good to include it by default - Just not at the top where it only gets in the way without serving any immediate purpose.
It is REALLY irritating to have to scroll through my own email to get to the response. I already KNOW what I wrote, I'm now interested in what YOU wrote in response. If I come back a month later having the quote of the original will be useful. In that case, which is usually the only case I'm concerned about, having only the bit that my corespondent thought relevant is less useful than having my entire message unedited.
Bottom posting is just as brain-dead. It really depends on the message length and how many replies are being included. Most of the emails I send and receive are reasonably long - I want the post on top and the quoted text of what I'm replying to is included for reference only. I only "bottom post" if I'm responding to a very short message which is relatively rare for me.
So in the end they reduced the effective intelligence of the good guys until they wouldn't run and then they got what we see now.
That was the joke but not really the case. The warriors would fight with opponents directly in front of them, They started out in two masses that ran towards each other in hopes that they would run into an opponent and fight it. But their field of "sight" was too narrow and they ended up running past each other and out the other side of the battle. They made the AI a little smarter so that it would run into the battle, pick the nearest opponent and attack.
I totally agree with this... there are too many people that make a fetish out of a piece of paper. Paper promises aren't worth very much. BUT, treaties can have an effect, but they have to have some tangible reality behind them other than an empty promise. Something along the lines of the non-proliferation treaties where there is a tangible benefit (technical help with technology) in return for opening up for inspections. The main problem with this arrangement is again the fetish about the piece of paper - some regimes enter the treaty without any good faith and then flout their side of the bargain but the consequences are avoided to retain the illusion of the piece of paper.
I've also heard this canard about the "left-wing media" for twenty years. Apart from NPR and PBS, what left-wing media has the US had?
What would be an objective way of going about figuring out exactly what kind of natural biases the mainstream media has? How about an opinion poll of reporters, anchors, publishers, and news management? - every poll ever done reveals that newsrooms are overwhelmingly liberal. Ahh... But their corporate masters set the party line and all those otherwise liberal reporters, anchors etc. dutifully toe the line? Let's look at the political giving of those "conservative" corporations. Hmm... the corporate masters don't seem to be providing much balance.
This is not to say that a bunch of liberal reporters working for corporations dominated, managed and usually owned by liberals don't TRY to be objective. Nor that they don't follow stories that hurt Democrats politically when it is "juicy" (or on occasion even because it is in fact newsworthy). It certainly isn't to say that they intentionally spin the news for partisan advantage. BUT it is natural to perceive people that you agree with as reasonable and well informed and to see people you disagree with as unreasonable, ignorant or even evil. This comes across whenever you watch the evening news or read the major daily papers.
I agree that cable and talk radio are conservative and usually in a much more self-conscious and transparent way. But that conservative voice is so successful because approximately half the population was in a continual state of aggravation when they watched or read the traditional media. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are only slightly less irritating to conservatives as Tony Snow is to liberals. Actually I think the unexamined assumption that "that's the way it is" without any consciousness that many would disagree is actually MORE irritating - Tony Snow KNOWS he is a conservative, he KNOWS at least half the people disagree with him - Dan Rather thinks of himself as the soul of objectivity.
Think about the POV from which the observation is being recorded ("the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water." ), and about the atmospheric conditions that we assume to be prevalent in the early formation of the earth and perhaps persisted even after the very first life forms came into being (Opaque, then translucent, then transparent)
Now read the Genesis account again
1:1 The entire universe created.
1:2 POV for following observations is stated as sea level. Conditions described as formless, void and dark (formative earth, thick opaque atmosphere?)
1:3-5 Light and darkness, day and night (atmosphere thins?)
1:9-10 land masses push up from out of the waters.
1:11-13 vegetable life appears
1:14-19 Sun and Moon appear (oxygenation from vegetable life thins the atmosphere further?)
1:20-23 Sea life appears
1:24-25 Animal life appears
1:26-28 Human life appears.
Makes you go hmmm....
Is this concept really so hard to understand? They want to see a two hour movie but there are 3-5 minutes of content that they find objectionable and don't want to see. Your solution is that they should not watch the movie at all for the sake of that ~5 minutes. The producers of this device and the people that buy it prefer to watch the movie and simply edit out the small bit (usually utterly irrelevant to the plot) that they find objectionable.
Their stance which you disagree with and may find bizarre is not "stupid" or "laughable". Sex and sexual attraction are powerful forces in individuals and in human relationships, not to mention the natural result of sex: children (in case you thought sex had no other biological function beyond orgasm). While unrestrained indulgence is certainly one popular approach (for obvious reasons) almost every culture in human history has developed restraints and sometimes elaborate traditions that channel these forces. While the case for these restraints is not immediately obvious (especially for sexually frustrated young adult males) the fact is that social science suggests that such restraints DO have valuable benefits for the individual and for the society as a whole. There is a high correlation between many social pathologies and unrestrained sexual behavior. More than a few of these traditionalists that you brand "idiots" are in fact at least reasonably intelligent and thoughtful, and may themselves find YOUR views laughable and stupid or at least short-sighted and naive.
instead of deciding, for themselves, exactly what parts are bad.
The interesting problem then is how to make that decision when it is the viewing of it that violates their conscience. The solution is to have someone else that you trust (at least to some degree) make that judgment. Sure you are not really in "control" but unless you are yourself the film-maker you weren't in control before either.
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Note that the OP said "every single" Few people would say that commercial duplication of your work is justified. However, if I find a neat image in a magazine and tack it to my wall, and one of my friends says "neat, can you scan that for me?" Should I have to track you down and give you a buck or two
No, but the technology we are talking about wouldn't prevent you from doing so. Though it defines the limit of "a few friends" as exactly 5 friends. Apparently this DRM scheme (whatever it's technical merits or likelyhood of success) isn't concerned with such informal and acceptable sharing. It is obviously intended to prevent you from sharing your music with an unlimited number of friends.
The difficulty is that current technology makes EVERYONE a potential publisher. Putting your ripped CD collection up on a P2P network isn't sharing with a few friends - it is sharing with a few thousand friends. Ripping a few thousand CD's for sale isn't THAT much more difficult and it is being done on a reasonably grand scale.
The argument from the "information wants to be free" side is that artists should freely distribute and give away their product and find some other way to profit from their art. The usual suggestion is live performances, that is something that could work with musicians but may be more difficult for for writers. I rather doubt that the lecture circuit is profitable enough for writers to make their living off of. Of course if the profit is in the lectures why bother with writing it down, that just devalues the lecture which is where the profit lies, at most books (being free) would reveal just enough to entice and audience for the lecture. a return to oral tradition would be interesting but I'm not sure it would count as "progress of the useful arts".
Copyright isn't there to create a market, it's there to add value to society.
Copyrights entire function IS to create a market and thereby add value to society. Without copyright law it would be impossible to make a living as an artist or author (or many other things). My personal example is not the best illustration of this, a writer or novelist is a better example. It is quite easy for competing publishers to buy one copy of a new book and then sell it as their own without compensating the author. This was the problem that led to the creation of copyright law in the first place and it is *exactly* the problem that is presented by P2P networks and easy CD duplication. Each person sharing his private collection with his 10,000 closest friends is in fact a "publisher" and is in direct competition with the artist (and his publisher) selling his work. It makes no difference that you aren't selling it, in fact it is *worse* - it is hard for the artist to compete with "free".
Fair use is perhaps the most important part of copyright law and it's getting ignored in the interests of using it as a buisness model
Fair use is not the central purpose of copyright law - it is the bundle of exceptions. Places where you CAN legitimately copy and even in limited ways distribute work without compensating the artist. "fair use" was largely carved out by courts providing for "fair" exceptions. Given the wholesale copyright violation that has been occasioned by new technologies that make it very easy for EVERY consumer to around and be a publisher without compensating the artist it is likely that those allowances for fair use that are routinely abused for things that were NEVER considered fair use that some fair use allowances will be restricted more than they were before.
That's the way it works. That's the way its *supposed* to work.
No, take a different example: an author. He sells his product to consumers who pay for books through the intermediary of a publisher. Copyright law means that you cannot buy his book and make unlimited copies to distribute - even if you distribute them for free. If you run your own copy through your copier for your own use, fine. If you make 10-10,000 copies to give away to all who ask - not fine. This is EXACTLY the case that copyright law was intended to prevent and is pretty much EXACTLY the case that the music industry is dealing with (poorly).
You can argue that it shouldn't be this way, that musicians, artists and authors should give away the product of their work for free and make their living on live performances (concerts, lectures) but that is not the law or the thinking behind the law as it currently IS.
It's an interesting (but apparently little known) fact that the purpose of copyright law is not to generate money for copyright holders.
Well really it is. The purpose of copyright law is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" but the WAY that this progress is promoted is by.. (wait for it)... generating money for copyright holders(!)
You are right though that making money for the copyright holder is the MEANS to the end and not the end itself. Copyright law needs to be extensively reformed. The current time limit (70 years after the death of the artist) is FAR too long, so long that it is becoming a BARRIER to the "progress of useful arts"
The copyright holder does not need to be paid for every single copy that takes place,
No, they DO. I make my living as a "copyright holder" - I am an illustrator and a designer. I sell copyrights on my work to my clients, I have often had people "steal" my work, using it commercially without compensating me... my clients competitor is getting my work for free. Art for it's own sake may be a labor of love (product illustrations on the other hand never are) but I still need to eat (thus the product illustrations). When my clients competitors just use my work without compensating me, I'm sorry but that IS and SHOULD BE a crime.
There is a certain amount of hypocrisy here. If Microsoft just lifted GNU code wholesale and turned around and sold it without honoring the terms of the license there would be outrage. But why? doesn't information want to be free? Why can't they just do what they want with it freely (making their own alterations and selling the binary result for a profit)? Free software is only possible with Intellectual property law backing it up. You can give it away under CONDITIONS because you OWN it (at least for a time).
The passive tags on individual items have a range of about 3 meters.
There are active RF tags for larger things like containers, box cars, maybe down to palettes on the warehouse floor.
Don't tell anyone though; this horrible 'environmentalism' trend is hurting profits at great companies like Enron.
No Enron was a very "green" company. They were a natural gas company that slowly morphed into a kind of energy brokerage. They heavily pushed environmental legislation because a lot of it included schemes that involved a lot of brokering of energy between different entities which is what Enron did. Enron was the biggest (only?) corporate lobbying for passage the Kyoto treaty - and they lobbied heavily for it.
Yes, perfectly clear, and what was the punishment for killing?
WTF does "Disneyed" mean in this context anyway?
I think it is pretty obvious. They ARE (or rather, were) known for *GOOD* animated movies. Disney was a creative studio once upon a time - innovators of new technology and artistic storytellers that consistently produced compelling hit movies. It was the secret of their success and made them a powerhouse. They have been riding that initial success for the past 50 years with a brief pale renaissance in the 90's that is now over.
Today Pixar is what Disney was in the 40's and 50's: pioneers of a new medium that aren't so enthralled by that new medium itself that they forget that it is only the medium and that the real point, and beauty is in the story and artistry itself. Pixar has lifted Disney's original culture, it's methods and even it's jargon as Disney has lost them. If Walt were thawed out today he would feel quite at home at Pixar but lost and alienated (and very sad) over at Disney.
Disney has a 3D unit...
3D really has nothing to do with it. Pixar is NOT primarily successful due to it's CG animation skills. It is successful due to it's storytelling skills. THAT is what Pixar has and Disney lacks. To the degree that Disney thinks that 3D is the secret of Pixar's success Disney will fail.
Spoken like an MBA rather than a artist. The logical flaw is in point #3, and it's caused by the fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the word "franchise" in point number 4.
WHY are the Toy Store/Nemo/Monster "franchises" worth anything? Because the story was good, the movie was well crafted - In short because they are a work of art rather than a "franchise".
You CAN predict if future movies will be successful, if you have real talent at your disposal, and both the talent and the management see it as art and refuse to compromise it for short term profits you have very good odds of continuing to produce hits and valuable franchises. You will have the occasional flop but even the flops will often end up being long term successes years after their initial failure (like Fantasia) This attitude was what made Disney a success in the first place and what makes Pixar a success today.
If you view it as a "franchise" - a mere vehicle for merchandising and profits you have very good odds of producing a string of lackluster flops and of driving once valuable franchises into the ground This is what is happening at Disney today.
Disney will get two more hits out of Pixar, it will retain the rights to the Toy Story/Monsters/Nemo/Incredibles/Cars franchises which it will profit from immensely... But they can't create NEW franchises that will be similarly profitable, and they will run the franchises the DO have into the ground with crappy direct-to-video sequels. Pixar will go on to create new franchises from which it will keep all the profits, after a decade or so Pixar will be profiting from the new/fresh/latest franchises they created while Disney will still be hawking increasingly dated Woody dolls and Nemo plush toys.
used to americans thinking that everyone south the border is a tequila-drinking, sombrero-wearing mexican.
They aren't?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/4/12/72 Along with similar posts in other forums
Mexico is not a particularly poor country, by third world standards it's a model of economic growth. Moneterrey and Saltillo are both centers of economic activity. Still plop down rural mississippi in Mexico and they might not be centers of economic activity like Saltillo or Monterrey but they wouldn't stick out as being particularly poor (if those receiving it keep getting US welfare they'll be quite wealthy). As I said - worst case they fit right in. Plop them down in Oaxaca and they'll be an island of fabulous wealth.
Go to rural parts of Mississippi some time.
Are you agreeing with me? Picking the very poorest geographic portion of the USA as your point of comparison pretty much makes my point. Rural mississippi, and a few other isolated pockets of extreme poverty DO get pretty close to third world standards - but then again rural mississippi is remarkable for it's poverty, it is NOT the USA as a whole but the very bottom end of it. Even at that we are leaving off with our very worst case right where much of the world is just getting started. Rural mississippi at it's absolute worst looks like the third world *on average* - NOT particularly poor. Plop it down in the middle of any third world nation and it would at worst fit right in, in most cases it would be hailed as an economic miracle. Compare it to a similarly benighted economic backwater in India (or any third-world nation) and there is simply no comparison.
If that distended belly is caused by beer rather than by Kwashiorkor you are doing OK by third world standards.
So, when reading this, did anyone else think that with the exception of the water supply issue, these are all applicable to the U.S. as well? Obviously not to the same degree, but still.
No.
I think the fact that a major health concern about the poor in America is obesity pretty much says everything that needs to be said about it. There is no real comparison between what we call "poverty" and what the rest of the world calls "poverty"
I've also seen otherwise intelligent people that readily adopt the stance that the people that disagree with them are mentally defective rather than actually engage them on the merits of their arguments.
It is quite possible that the truth of your position is NOT self-evident and that other intelligent people looking at the same body of facts have HONESTLY and INTELLIGENTLY arrived at different conclusions.
Did you ever try to only quote relevant snippets instead of blindly copying everything?
Sure. For instance when answering a list of questions or addressing a series of points in which case I'll usually have a short intro dealing with generalities and then quote -> response -> next quote -> next response, etc.
Ill' also strip out everything but the immediately preceding message in the thread. There is usually no reason to continue sending along the entire history of the conversation.
If i'm using email as a glorified chat program with very short questions & answers the quoted original goes at the top with my reply at the bottom. But in that case it is still easy enough with the default "top posting" to hit the down arrow a couple of times to put my insertion point at the bottom.
But usually I write so that the quoted text is not necessary to understand what I wrote. The original I'm responding to is attached at the bottom (if at all) merely as a reference. Frankly it's usually only included because that is what the software does by default. It's not necessary, I don't anticipate that the recipient will even read it. Presumable they already know what it says. BUT it is occasionally useful as a reference so it does no harm and potentially some good to include it by default - Just not at the top where it only gets in the way without serving any immediate purpose.
It is REALLY irritating to have to scroll through my own email to get to the response. I already KNOW what I wrote, I'm now interested in what YOU wrote in response. If I come back a month later having the quote of the original will be useful. In that case, which is usually the only case I'm concerned about, having only the bit that my corespondent thought relevant is less useful than having my entire message unedited.
Bottom posting is just as brain-dead. It really depends on the message length and how many replies are being included. Most of the emails I send and receive are reasonably long - I want the post on top and the quoted text of what I'm replying to is included for reference only. I only "bottom post" if I'm responding to a very short message which is relatively rare for me.
So in the end they reduced the effective intelligence of the good guys until they wouldn't run and then they got what we see now.
That was the joke but not really the case. The warriors would fight with opponents directly in front of them, They started out in two masses that ran towards each other in hopes that they would run into an opponent and fight it. But their field of "sight" was too narrow and they ended up running past each other and out the other side of the battle. They made the AI a little smarter so that it would run into the battle, pick the nearest opponent and attack.
I totally agree with this... there are too many people that make a fetish out of a piece of paper. Paper promises aren't worth very much. BUT, treaties can have an effect, but they have to have some tangible reality behind them other than an empty promise. Something along the lines of the non-proliferation treaties where there is a tangible benefit (technical help with technology) in return for opening up for inspections. The main problem with this arrangement is again the fetish about the piece of paper - some regimes enter the treaty without any good faith and then flout their side of the bargain but the consequences are avoided to retain the illusion of the piece of paper.
So either it's specifically for video, or it's a totally generic compression system. Either way, I don't see how these suits could succeed.
The article didn't appear to say anything about it but perhaps they suit is only going after companies using motion JPEG?
I've also heard this canard about the "left-wing media" for twenty years. Apart from NPR and PBS, what left-wing media has the US had?
What would be an objective way of going about figuring out exactly what kind of natural biases the mainstream media has? How about an opinion poll of reporters, anchors, publishers, and news management? - every poll ever done reveals that newsrooms are overwhelmingly liberal. Ahh... But their corporate masters set the party line and all those otherwise liberal reporters, anchors etc. dutifully toe the line? Let's look at the political giving of those "conservative" corporations. Hmm... the corporate masters don't seem to be providing much balance.
This is not to say that a bunch of liberal reporters working for corporations dominated, managed and usually owned by liberals don't TRY to be objective. Nor that they don't follow stories that hurt Democrats politically when it is "juicy" (or on occasion even because it is in fact newsworthy). It certainly isn't to say that they intentionally spin the news for partisan advantage. BUT it is natural to perceive people that you agree with as reasonable and well informed and to see people you disagree with as unreasonable, ignorant or even evil. This comes across whenever you watch the evening news or read the major daily papers.
I agree that cable and talk radio are conservative and usually in a much more self-conscious and transparent way. But that conservative voice is so successful because approximately half the population was in a continual state of aggravation when they watched or read the traditional media. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are only slightly less irritating to conservatives as Tony Snow is to liberals. Actually I think the unexamined assumption that "that's the way it is" without any consciousness that many would disagree is actually MORE irritating - Tony Snow KNOWS he is a conservative, he KNOWS at least half the people disagree with him - Dan Rather thinks of himself as the soul of objectivity.
Think about the POV from which the observation is being recorded ("the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water." ), and about the atmospheric conditions that we assume to be prevalent in the early formation of the earth and perhaps persisted even after the very first life forms came into being (Opaque, then translucent, then transparent) Now read the Genesis account again 1:1 The entire universe created. 1:2 POV for following observations is stated as sea level. Conditions described as formless, void and dark (formative earth, thick opaque atmosphere?) 1:3-5 Light and darkness, day and night (atmosphere thins?) 1:9-10 land masses push up from out of the waters. 1:11-13 vegetable life appears 1:14-19 Sun and Moon appear (oxygenation from vegetable life thins the atmosphere further?) 1:20-23 Sea life appears 1:24-25 Animal life appears 1:26-28 Human life appears. Makes you go hmmm....
Is this concept really so hard to understand? They want to see a two hour movie but there are 3-5 minutes of content that they find objectionable and don't want to see. Your solution is that they should not watch the movie at all for the sake of that ~5 minutes. The producers of this device and the people that buy it prefer to watch the movie and simply edit out the small bit (usually utterly irrelevant to the plot) that they find objectionable.
Their stance which you disagree with and may find bizarre is not "stupid" or "laughable". Sex and sexual attraction are powerful forces in individuals and in human relationships, not to mention the natural result of sex: children (in case you thought sex had no other biological function beyond orgasm). While unrestrained indulgence is certainly one popular approach (for obvious reasons) almost every culture in human history has developed restraints and sometimes elaborate traditions that channel these forces. While the case for these restraints is not immediately obvious (especially for sexually frustrated young adult males) the fact is that social science suggests that such restraints DO have valuable benefits for the individual and for the society as a whole. There is a high correlation between many social pathologies and unrestrained sexual behavior. More than a few of these traditionalists that you brand "idiots" are in fact at least reasonably intelligent and thoughtful, and may themselves find YOUR views laughable and stupid or at least short-sighted and naive.
instead of deciding, for themselves, exactly what parts are bad.
The interesting problem then is how to make that decision when it is the viewing of it that violates their conscience. The solution is to have someone else that you trust (at least to some degree) make that judgment. Sure you are not really in "control" but unless you are yourself the film-maker you weren't in control before either.