I currently have a motherboard, CPU (Athlon 64 3200+ socket 939), and memory left over from various projects. This would be the perfect adjunct to it. No need to get a case, power supply, or hard drive, just throw the CD on top of the rest of the parts; it's not like I'm going to use it.
I'm not really worried about the whole-second offsets, they're relatively straightforward. I'm just thinking that as precise as my (wholly hypothetical) atomic clock is, it can't be truly accurate unless I can somehow synchronize it precisely with some equally precise standard. Is GPS (or any reasonable GPS receiver I might lay my hands on) precise enough to synchronize an atomic clock to within that clock's own inherent precision?
Compare the *referents* of physical property to the *referents* of intellectual property. Both are tangible!
No. The referent of copyright is an intangible -- it is a literary, musical, etc, work, like that paragraph I posted earlier. The reference of a patent is intangible as well. You have to dereference at least twice to find anything tangible; a copy (or fixation) of a literary work, or a particular instance of an invention. Which makes it different from both real and personal property.
Just like the right to your "personal property" refers to pretty much every TANGIBLE thing that could infringe on it.
Which illustrates your error. My personal property is itself tangible: my car, my computer, my furniture. There's no need to resort to your axe (which you might use to destroy them) to bring anything tangible into it.
Oops, never mind, I slipped a decimal. They are using absolute numbers to make the savings look more significant, but they're not comparing lifetime figures to 1-year figures.
OK, first of all, those Canadian idling costs are inflated by the fact that much of the idling is not _waste_ -- much of it is intended to keep the passengers warm.
Second, the claim is that by eliminating 5 minutes per day per car of idling, 4500 tonnes of green house gases would be saved per day. But the total emissions per day just for cars are 133,150 tonnes. It's easy to make absolute numbers look big.
Same goes for the energy star light bulb bit. Except they're being even sneakier, and comparing the energy savings over the life of the bulb (supposedly several years) to 1-year consumption figures -- you can see this by noting they claim $600 million in energy savings if every household used one such bulb, and that each bulb saves $30 over its lifetime. That works out to 200 million households, which is about right.
So the tangible things that Paramount's copyright on that paragraph refer to are pretty much everything which can infringe it, from the crudest stylus to the Internet? That doesn't make sense. The tangible things which real property rights refer to are the property itself, not those things which can trespass on it. Same for personal property.
You only have to resort to claiming the instruments of infringement as the "tangible things" in the case of IP because the property itself _isn't_ tangible.
With a GPS time source you get the time value (in ASCII) through a serial port, but the synchronization is done through a pulse per second interrupt. So the latency on the serial bus doesn't matter as long as it is significantly less than one second.
OK, as much fun as it would be to have my own stratum-1 NTP server, how do you (read: some ordinary joe, not a university researcher) synchronize these things to TAI in the first place?
IP rights make it illegal for me to write "Space, the final frontier / These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise / blah blah blah / where no man has gone before". What tangible things have those IP rights restricted me from using? _My_ keyboard? Contrast with real property, which I'd have to actually enter to trespass upon.
And I have a problem with the definition of "energy needs". Direct and indirect subsidies make energy so cheap we're careless and stupid with it. We could make major reductions in energy use with no effect on our lifestyles. One easy example: a national no-idling law. If you're going to leave your car/truck running for more than a minute, you'd better have a damned good reason. Otherwise, you pay a fine. Sort of like a "selfish asshole tax". HUGE energy savings. Another: use compact fluorescent lights temporarily while we develop full-spectrum LED's. Again, huge savings, low cost. (I know fluorescents aren't 100% enviro-cool, but the total cost is less than regular light bulbs.)
This sort of stuff is feel-good but insignificant.
Idling cars and trucks are insignificant in terms of energy usage -- and don't forget that starting them and stopping them has an energy cost as well. The amount of energy used by incandescent lighting which can be replaced with CF lighting is also tiny in the larger scheme of things. Eliminating all of these things would not change energy demand significantly.
The sad thing is, Kurt Vonnegut was right over 50 years ago when he predicted what life would be like the "future". Of course he made some errors, such as MBAs are the rich ones instead of engineering PhDs, and the obligatory mid 50's "massive vaccum tube supercomputer", but in general he was right on. In "Player Piano" most of humanity is either in the army or in the "Recreation and Reclamation", ie masses of unskilled laborers who dig ditches and whatnot. Really seems to describe the current situation in the US today quite well.
Really? The November 2007 statistics have about 154 million people in the US labor force, 147 million of them employed. 51 million are "management and professional". 36 million are "sales and office". 16 million are "Natural resources, construction, and maintenance" and 18 million are "Production, transportation, and material moving". The latter two are your blue collar occupations, but most of those are skilled, not unskilled. There are 78 million people over 16 officially not in the labor force, but of those only 4 million want a job. The military totals only about 1.5 million.
Yep. There was a CompUSA and a Microcenter close to me, the CompUSA a few miles closer. Almost every time I went to CompUSA, I'd either not find what I want, or find it in a locked cabinet where I could get no help, and then I'd kick myself and do what I should have done in the first place, which is go to Microcenter.
If you can't keep a computer store running in King of Prussia, PA, you've got to be doing something wrong. The area's lousy with geeks.
Microcenter is a little more expensive than NewEgg usually, but it's worth it for the instant gratification sometimes. E.g. getting that hard drive today means the Mythbox is back in operation THIS weekend rather than NEXT weekend.
Righto! So, slashdotters... time to take up the pen. Let's draft that copyright law the way it was meant to be, send it to our friendly congresspeople, and if they don't act on it, threaten not to fix their computers next time it gets clogged with malware.
"Title 17 of the United States Code is repealed in its entirety. The United States hereby withdraws from the Berne Convention and the World Intellectual Property Organization"
Now I submit that the MPAA could adequately fulfil your desire to evaluate/preview a movie before purchasing it by, say, offering the first 15-20 minutes of it as a free download, after which you can choose whether or not to purchase the full movie. I suspect, however, that such an idea wouldn't fly very far here. I'll leave it to you to figure out why.
It would work for a while, but eventually the MPAA members would start making good 20-minute intros to shit movies. Just like now where the best parts of a movie are in the trailers (and sometimes not in the movies themselves).
Why is it specifically in favour of 'Big' media companies? What is it that prevents this also helping out small media companies, and even individuals who create copyrighted works?
They won't even be able to get the attention of the government copyright cops.
But it also needs to be enforced. Writing to your elected representative is the correct way to achieve sensible laws.
That's the cry of those who have come up with actual effective ways of achieving ridiculous laws, and want to waste their opponent's time and effort travelling down ineffective paths.
POTS is 56kbit per second (7 bits at 8000 symbols per second), not 8kbit. Standard compression algorithms can cut it to about half that, but not all the way down to 8kbit.
I am sure there will be arguments about 'false positives' and 'copyrights shouldn't exist to begin with' and 'carrier class' and all of the usual things. But if this type of solution were to be implemented, would it be a bad thing? And why?
Yes. Because the strength of P2P is that there's no way for the powers that be to get a hand on it. There's no one person or small group of persons who they can browbeat, sue, arrest, or shoot in order to stop whatever activity they want to stop from occurring via P2P. Some sort of ISP-wide "P2P cache" provides exactly that handle -- and it will be used.
One of the rulings in MPAA v. 2600 was that "interoperability" applies only to program to program interoperability, not program to data interoperability.
You can drive a truck through that "exclusively" language. It says nothing about activities related to a mission intended to put, e.g., a monkey on mars. Or a human somewhere else. Life support for a Mars mission? No problem, it's for the monkey project. Mars suits? Those aren't Mars suits, they're suits for some moon of Jupiter...
US truck routing programs like PC*Miler and IntelliRoute DO know about truck restrictions. Which means that on the Main Line in Pennsylvania, which has many train bridges less than 13" 6' above the roadway (one has under 9 feet clearance!), it's usually rental trucks which hit them rather than the big commercial ones...
Geeks! learn how to talk to people and convince them that your position is the correct one. THIS will be the most challenging yet rewarding effort of you life. This is our World War II.
It's a defining characteristic of geeks that we cannot do that. (except in the context of fraud, i.e. "social engineering")
Further, if we could, our interests would naturally become aligned with the other persuasive people in the world (politicians, salespeople, etc) rather than with geeks. And the status quo ante would thus remain unchanged, except that the number of geeks would become reduced.
Doctorow is our Churchill. Lessig is our Roosevelt (the crippled one). I don't know who our Stalin is, but we're probably better off without him.
Is it really not obvious? Gates himself, of course.
The thing with violence and freedom is when you stop threatening violence, you start losing freedom. American Revolution 2 by 2012. Bigger, badder, and 40% more extreme than the original.
The agents-provocateur are out in force tonight...
Slashdot Mirror
I currently have a motherboard, CPU (Athlon 64 3200+ socket 939), and memory left over from various projects. This would be the perfect adjunct to it. No need to get a case, power supply, or hard drive, just throw the CD on top of the rest of the parts; it's not like I'm going to use it.
I'm not really worried about the whole-second offsets, they're relatively straightforward. I'm just thinking that as precise as my (wholly hypothetical) atomic clock is, it can't be truly accurate unless I can somehow synchronize it precisely with some equally precise standard. Is GPS (or any reasonable GPS receiver I might lay my hands on) precise enough to synchronize an atomic clock to within that clock's own inherent precision?
No. The referent of copyright is an intangible -- it is a literary, musical, etc, work, like that paragraph I posted earlier. The reference of a patent is intangible as well. You have to dereference at least twice to find anything tangible; a copy (or fixation) of a literary work, or a particular instance of an invention. Which makes it different from both real and personal property.
Oops, never mind, I slipped a decimal. They are using absolute numbers to make the savings look more significant, but they're not comparing lifetime figures to 1-year figures.
OK, first of all, those Canadian idling costs are inflated by the fact that much of the idling is not _waste_ -- much of it is intended to keep the passengers warm.
Second, the claim is that by eliminating 5 minutes per day per car of idling, 4500 tonnes of green house gases would be saved per day. But the total emissions per day just for cars are 133,150 tonnes. It's easy to make absolute numbers look big.
http://oee.nrcan.gc.ca/corporate/statistics/neud/dpa/tablestrends2/tran_ca_30_e_1.cfm?attr=0
Same goes for the energy star light bulb bit. Except they're being even sneakier, and comparing the energy savings over the life of the bulb (supposedly several years) to 1-year consumption figures -- you can see this by noting they claim $600 million in energy savings if every household used one such bulb, and that each bulb saves $30 over its lifetime. That works out to 200 million households, which is about right.
So the tangible things that Paramount's copyright on that paragraph refer to are pretty much everything which can infringe it, from the crudest stylus to the Internet? That doesn't make sense. The tangible things which real property rights refer to are the property itself, not those things which can trespass on it. Same for personal property.
You only have to resort to claiming the instruments of infringement as the "tangible things" in the case of IP because the property itself _isn't_ tangible.
With a GPS time source you get the time value (in ASCII) through a serial port, but the synchronization is done through a pulse per second interrupt. So the latency on the serial bus doesn't matter as long as it is significantly less than one second.
OK, as much fun as it would be to have my own stratum-1 NTP server, how do you (read: some ordinary joe, not a university researcher) synchronize these things to TAI in the first place?
IP rights make it illegal for me to write "Space, the final frontier / These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise / blah blah blah / where no man has gone before". What tangible things have those IP rights restricted me from using? _My_ keyboard? Contrast with real property, which I'd have to actually enter to trespass upon.
This sort of stuff is feel-good but insignificant.
Idling cars and trucks are insignificant in terms of energy usage -- and don't forget that starting them and stopping them has an energy cost as well. The amount of energy used by incandescent lighting which can be replaced with CF lighting is also tiny in the larger scheme of things. Eliminating all of these things would not change energy demand significantly.
Really? The November 2007 statistics have about 154 million people in the US labor force, 147 million of them employed. 51 million are "management and professional". 36 million are "sales and office". 16 million are "Natural resources, construction, and maintenance" and 18 million are "Production, transportation, and material moving". The latter two are your blue collar occupations, but most of those are skilled, not unskilled. There are 78 million people over 16 officially not in the labor force, but of those only 4 million want a job. The military totals only about 1.5 million.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.cpseea38.txt
http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/MILITARY/ms1.pdf
Yep. There was a CompUSA and a Microcenter close to me, the CompUSA a few miles closer. Almost every time I went to CompUSA, I'd either not find what I want, or find it in a locked cabinet where I could get no help, and then I'd kick myself and do what I should have done in the first place, which is go to Microcenter.
If you can't keep a computer store running in King of Prussia, PA, you've got to be doing something wrong. The area's lousy with geeks.
Microcenter is a little more expensive than NewEgg usually, but it's worth it for the instant gratification sometimes. E.g. getting that hard drive today means the Mythbox is back in operation THIS weekend rather than NEXT weekend.
"Title 17 of the United States Code is repealed in its entirety. The United States hereby withdraws from the Berne Convention and the World Intellectual Property Organization"
It would work for a while, but eventually the MPAA members would start making good 20-minute intros to shit movies. Just like now where the best parts of a movie are in the trailers (and sometimes not in the movies themselves).
Ha. Ayn Rand never wrote anything that concise. It took her half a page to write that, and it's one of the shortest speeches in Atlas Shrugged.
They won't even be able to get the attention of the government copyright cops.
That's the cry of those who have come up with actual effective ways of achieving ridiculous laws, and want to waste their opponent's time and effort travelling down ineffective paths.
POTS is 56kbit per second (7 bits at 8000 symbols per second), not 8kbit. Standard compression algorithms can cut it to about half that, but not all the way down to 8kbit.
Yes. Because the strength of P2P is that there's no way for the powers that be to get a hand on it. There's no one person or small group of persons who they can browbeat, sue, arrest, or shoot in order to stop whatever activity they want to stop from occurring via P2P. Some sort of ISP-wide "P2P cache" provides exactly that handle -- and it will be used.
One of the rulings in MPAA v. 2600 was that "interoperability" applies only to program to program interoperability, not program to data interoperability.
You can drive a truck through that "exclusively" language. It says nothing about activities related to a mission intended to put, e.g., a monkey on mars. Or a human somewhere else. Life support for a Mars mission? No problem, it's for the monkey project. Mars suits? Those aren't Mars suits, they're suits for some moon of Jupiter...
US truck routing programs like PC*Miler and IntelliRoute DO know about truck restrictions. Which means that on the Main Line in Pennsylvania, which has many train bridges less than 13" 6' above the roadway (one has under 9 feet clearance!), it's usually rental trucks which hit them rather than the big commercial ones...
It's a defining characteristic of geeks that we cannot do that. (except in the context of fraud, i.e. "social engineering")
Further, if we could, our interests would naturally become aligned with the other persuasive people in the world (politicians, salespeople, etc) rather than with geeks. And the status quo ante would thus remain unchanged, except that the number of geeks would become reduced.
Is it really not obvious? Gates himself, of course.
The agents-provocateur are out in force tonight...