The owner of the machine producing the output is the owner of the output.
So while Wolfram might successfully claim ownership of the output of Wolfram Alpha, no way in hell could, for example, Microsoft claim ownership of things made on your own computer just because you're running "their" software on it, because it's only "their" software inasmuch as they own the copyrights on it; the actual copy of the software, and the machine it's running on, are yours.
Though it would also seem necessary for the owner of a machine to be able to transfer ownership of that machine's output to someone else if they liked, e.g. if you were renting a machine, common sense would seem to suggest you own its output, even though you don't own the machine.
This could raise questions about whether the user of a website like Wolfram Alpha could claim that, as he was the one using Wolfram's machine, and as a customer rather than as an employee (where work-for-hire laws might apply), he should be the owner of the output.
It could also raise the possibility of someone like Microsoft sneaking in a clause in their EULA (which nobody ever reads) claiming that anything produced with MS Word is actually copyrighted to Microsoft and you, the end user, merely have a license to use it... But I'd like to see that farce try to fly in court.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am a philosopher, and I disapprove of all intellectual property laws in general.
There were definitely similarities. Maybe more than I ever saw, since I only played the first Halo game. I could easily imagine both Halo and Marathon taking place in the same universe.
Though the two are now both officially and, even if that weren't so, obviously not set in the same universe anymore, those of us who have been following Bungie closely since they were seven guys working out of a basement in Chicago know that Halo was once (well before release) actually set in the Marathon universe explicitly. Master Chief was the Security Officer, the UNSC was the UESC, the Forerunners were the Jjaro, and the Covenant were the successors/leftovers of the Pfhor empire.
Now, however, Halo is a mere "spiritual sequel" to Marathon, nothing more... and probably for the better, as MS now has no stake in the Marathon franchise, now that Bungie is free again.
They made a Windows version of Marathon 2 back in '96, and the full trilogy is now playable via the open-source continuation of the Marathon engine, called Aleph One..
I wouldn't mind a refresh of the original Marathon. Upgrade the engine and graphics but keep the game play and sounds, other than converting to true surround sound. Was totally creepy playing that at 3am, even with just a stereo setup.
Then vsit Marathon Open Source to download an updated version of the Marathon engine, all three original games in formats compatible with the updated engine (free and legal), and a variety of graphical enhancements (high-res walls, weapons, basically everything but the monsters) created by the fans over the years.
Also, while you're at it download my own 52-level unofficial sequel to the Marathon Trilogy, complete with all-new hi-res goodness just like the originals now have: Eternal. Also highly recommended: Marathon: Rubicon, another unofficial sequel.
I did not miss that. That is NOT the exact opposite. He said a consensus of EXPERTS in LAW would be necessary to make one lawyer's opinion more important than anothers. Then he provides a consensus of 15 self-expressed math experts? So math expert = lawyer?
Emphasis mine. I read him as saying that a consensus of experts in law would be sufficient to establish one lawyer's credibility, not that it would be necessary. Other things may also be sufficient - and he seems to be suggesting that this consensus of self-expressed math experts is sufficient.
Of course, we're not dealing in strict deductive argument here, so sufficiency isn't quite black and white. The consensus of self-expressed math experts may lend some credibility to said lawyer, without establishing it with certainty; a consensus of experts in law may lend even more credibility, still without establishing it with certainty. Outside of pure math very little can ever be established with certainty.
Will they roll XHTML 2 features into X/HTML 5?
on
XHTML 2 Cancelled
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I see a lot of debate here about XML versus SGML (or SGML-like) serialization and parsing rules, and plenty of people (rightly) pointing out that there is an XML version of HTML 5.
But what about those features which those of us who already code strictly to spec either way really care about? New elements that were scheduled to debut in XHTML 2.0 such as nl, h and section, the ability to put href and src attributes in any element, etc?
Those are the sorts of things which made the debate for me, not some silly XML vs SGML, strict vs lenient debate - either way I'll be writing my code for strict compliance with spec. I'm more concerned with what the features of the spec will be! Less so with how it deals with people out of compliance with it.
So any news on whether X/HTML 5 will be incorporating any of these, now that it's a W3C project and XHTML 2 is dead?
Also: why does Slashdot's extrans mode no longer seem to work? Having to include P tags in full HTML mode is annoying, and plaintext doesn't support links.
I know this is a tangential question, but I've been wondering about this for a while, and this seems like the best forum to get a decent answer from intelligent people:
Why is all the development on electric and electric-hybrid cars going into fancy new systems with lithium ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells and (for hybrids) complicated switching between a conventional drive train and electric motors, instead of using and improving upon the time-tested diesel-electric technology which has efficiently powered many trains for quite some time now?
Build a simple all-electric car - just a body, steering rack, four wheels with a dynamo on each (there's your propulsion and your regenerative brakes), some circuity to control them all, and a small battery that holds just enough charge to get you up to speed, maybe twice that for a safety margin. Then stick the most efficient diesel or gas generator you've got in it to provide electricity to keep the battery charged. You lose a bunch of weight and mechanical complexity by ditching most of the drive train and transmission system for some simple wiring between the generator and the dynamos; the alternator and the standard car battery become redundant with the generator and main battery; heck you could even replace the radiator with a small steam engine for still increased efficiency, turning that excess heat into electricity instead of just disposing of it to the air.
Yes, it still uses some fossil fuels, but in the end most of our electricity comes from coal anyway (even for a wall-charged all-electric vehicle like the Model S here, which I am very excited about). This just seems like it would have been far cheaper, more efficient (in terms of both money and thermodynamics), and simpler a solution than the complicated hybrids they've been building for a while now; plus the technology has already existed in widespread use on trains for decades!
So why isn't anybody doing it in cars? Is there a good technical or economic reason?
Shit, I should learn to use preview. That should be:
<quote>"No one knows what is better for the people than the people themselves" and "The people <strong>do not</strong> know what is best for themselves" are not contrary propositions.</quote>
"No one knows what is better for the people than the people themselves" and "The people know what is best for themselves" are not contrary propositions. One can hold (like the GP) that the people know fuck-all about what's best for them, and still hold (like you) that having some elite minority rule over the common people would probably produce worse results than majority rule.
Or to put it in a simpler analogy: I, in all probability, know what's good for me better than anybody else does; but that doesn't mean I'm not a moron who's going to run my life into the ground.
I don't really agree that "list all" can be legally satisfied by "list none" (the polar opposite) if one of the items isn't able to be listed.
If that's boggling your mind, get this one. The following is absolutely true: <strong>All of my children are under the age of nine, <em>and</em> none of my children are under the age of nine.</strong> How is this possible?
I have no children.
In a strict logical sense, "all As are Bs" is equivalent to "no As are non-Bs". ('all' and 'none' are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan_dual">De Morgan dual</a>). So to say that "all of my children are under the age of nine" is to say that "none of my children are aged nine or older". If I have no children, then that is true: every last one of my zero children is under the age of nine. However, so is any other "all" or "none" statement about my children, including "none of my children are under the age of nine".
The more common colloquial usage of "all As are Bs" is to say that <em>some</em> things are As, AND that no As are non-Bs. But in strict formal logic, you need to explicitly state the additional fact that there are some As; just saying that all of them are Bs doesn't necessarily imply that there are any of them at all.
This bit of logic is not quite the root of the "any and all" confusion here, but for how unreasonable the law can be, legalese certainly has some nice logical rigor to it.
And if you think these kinds of things are fun, I encourage you to look into the difference between "if" and "only if", and consequently why "if and only if" is not redundant.
Then I wonder why it is used to treat ADHD? I always assumed that people with that condition needed less stimulation As I recall, people with AD(H)D have somewhat reversed reactions to stimulants and depressants. I think it has something to do with a part of the brain responsible for regulating the activity of the rest of the brain being under-active in such people. Stimulants increase the all-over brain activity levels, and that under-active part then reigns in the rest more than it usually would. The opposite happens with depressants.
Regardless of whether that is the correct explanation, I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to be convinced myself. Plenty of friends diagnosed ADHD who have such reactions. An ex-girlfriend of mine was actually prescribed a cup of coffee every morning as early as kindergarten. (Her kindergarten teacher protested, her mom eventually conceded, and sent her to school uncaffeinated; the next day, she came home with a note from her teacher requesting that she be properly caffeinated from now on). As an adult, alcohol would make her hyper, not groggy.
Having being diagnosed ADD myself as a young child, I've noticed similar effects on myself; a nice cup of chai or a Mountain Dew would chill me out, and alcohol would wire me up. Oddly enough, now that I'm on Prozac, they have the opposite (i.e. normal effects); alcohol makes me drunk, caffeine makes me hyper, etc.
You seem to have missed this bit from my post (I'll emphasize the important part):
Software is something of genuine market value (in any country that has effective copyright laws to create artificial scarcity, at least)
I don't believe in the moral legitimacy of intellectual property; in fact I hold that intellectual property rights are logically incompatible with physical property rights, and the latter take precedence. However, the whole damn credit market is dealing in largely imaginary goods anyway (although slightly more real than "intellectual" goods), so if we're working within that system anyway, using one to solve the other doesn't seem any worse. Also, my proposal doesn't require any of the US's more draconian IP laws, just basic copyright law of any sort, like most of the civilized world already has (for better or for worse).
I know this is supposed to be a joke, and I'm sick today so maybe my brain isn't working quite right... but something actually seems rather insightful about this suggestion.
Software is something of genuine market value (in any country that has effective copyright laws to create artificial scarcity, at least) that can be reproduced virtually for free. Seems like the perfect thing to get someone out of debt. Invest in it once and then rake in the dough.
Perhaps the US Gov't could arrange licences with certain highly successful software companies to trade *them* (the software companies) treasury bonds in exchange for licences to distribute those highly successful software packages (perhaps only internationally, reserving the domestic market to the private sector). Use the proceeds from that to pay down foreign debt. That still leaves the US Gov't with debt to some major US companies, which is a less than ideal situation, but certainly preferable to debt to foreign states: at least when that debt gets paid off, the money goes to business in the US, and therefrom to the employees of those businesses, and back around into the US economy.
If there was nothing more important, why would it be in the first amendment, instead of in, say, the original constitution itself?
Because the original constitution was written on the premise that people had every right that the constitution didn't explicitly give government the power to curtail. Note the language there; the constitution grants powers to the government (which otherwise has none), not rights to the people (who otherwise have all of them). It was feared that explicitly enumerating rights might imply that such a list was exhaustive, ruling out any rights not listed.
The Bill of Rights was only added because many states only agreed to ratify the constitution once such a bill of rights was promised to be added. The ninth and tenth amendments were the compromise added to quell the fears of the list being taken as exhaustive (the ninth explicitly stating that the list of people's rights is not exhaustive, and the tenth explicitly stating that the list of the Federal government's powers is exhaustive).
And of the rights people were worried about explicitly enumerating, freedom of speech (and the press, and religion, and assembly, all bundled together) was priority #1.
Seriously. This has nothing to do with morality. It is a question about ethics.
"Ethics" is the study of morality. "Ethical" and "moral" are synonyms. In what way do you understand the two terms such that they represent distinct concepts?
In Europe (actually, most places outside the US) we write DD-MM-YYYY or similar (DD/MM/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY etc). This seems more logical to me, as days are smaller than months, and months are smaller than years. In Japan, and in ISO date format, it's YYYY-MM-DD.
I much prefer the ISO format (and Japanese? interesting) because with most other numbers, including times, we write the most significant digits to the left. Three hundreds, two tens, and a one is written "321". Twelve hours, thirty-four minutes and fifty-six seconds is written "12:34:56". So it just makes sense that dates such as "In the two-thousand-ninth year, in the third month, on the fourteenth day" would be written "2009-03-14". So the American month-day format makes sense, but we just got stupid and wrote the year after it instead of before it. You Europeans on the other hand are consistent, but backward. (Although now that I write that elongated form, it does feel somewhat backward, even to my American ears; "the fourteenth day of the third month of the year two-thousand-nine" seems much more natural).
In the ISO format, as you are probably aware, this left-to-right date notation dovetails nicely with the time notation, e.g. it is currently 2009-03-14T19:36:03 as I write this. (Year 2009, Month 3, Day 14, Hour 19, Minute 36, Second 3).
2/7 is the 2nd of July (or July 2nd, in American).
Actually, in American English either of the written-out versions is acceptable (we celebrate "the Fourth of July", for instance), because either is unambiguous. Only in the abbreviated form does order matter, since which figure refers to to months and which to days is ambiguous if not for convention.
considering that 22/7 is closer to pi than 3.14, I think it's definitely rather more than less.
Actually, it's not.
pi = 3.14159265358979... (yes, that is from memory)
22/7 = 3.142857142857... (that is from my calculator)
Just ONE DIGIT past 3.14 and 22/7 is already less accurate. (pi = 3.142... while 22/7 = 3.143...). Furthermore, if you're dealing with measured numbers at all and need to keep track of significant figures (not like you'd be using memorized approximations of pi in such an instance anyway), 3.14 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/100 (that is, 3.14 is somewhere between 3.13 and 3.15), where 22/7 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/7 (that is, 22/7 is somewhere between 21/7 [or 3], and 23/7 [or 3.29]). So not only is 3.14 more accurate at it's precision than 22/7 at the same precision, but 3.14 is more precise than 22/7 as well.
why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive
Because on the Mac it's not, and most people championing Apple are Mac users. From what I hear about QuickTime, iTunes, etc on Windows, it sounds atrocious, and I can't imagine how Apple can stand having something so horrible tarnish their "it just works" image.
and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode
This has always pissed me off though, and until OSX I kept to an older version of QuickTime Player that didn't have that disabled. (QuickTime is not a player application but a whole media framework: file formats, codecs, APIs, etc. QuickTime Player, any version, calls on the underlying QuickTime API to handle everything; so sticking to the old Player while updating the framework didn't have any negative side effects).
Don't worry, with a cheesy title like that, someone's bound to pick it up soon and make a video of what you've expected to see. Pirate porn... mmm... "Come here, wench! Yarrr!"
Copyright law has various parameters that must be met before something is considered a "creative work" under the legislation. A short essay would probably meet the criteria, a two sentence post is likely to fall short of being considered a "creative work". And that is before you even need to worry about any notion of "fair use".
Can you cite those parameters from somewhere? Because in my multimedia arts program we had a class especially on licensing and distribution issues, and the way it was put to us was that an 'X' scratched on a piece of paper is instantly copyrighted. Heck, not playing an instrument can be copyrighted.
Slashdot Mirror
The owner of the machine producing the output is the owner of the output.
So while Wolfram might successfully claim ownership of the output of Wolfram Alpha, no way in hell could, for example, Microsoft claim ownership of things made on your own computer just because you're running "their" software on it, because it's only "their" software inasmuch as they own the copyrights on it; the actual copy of the software, and the machine it's running on, are yours.
Though it would also seem necessary for the owner of a machine to be able to transfer ownership of that machine's output to someone else if they liked, e.g. if you were renting a machine, common sense would seem to suggest you own its output, even though you don't own the machine.
This could raise questions about whether the user of a website like Wolfram Alpha could claim that, as he was the one using Wolfram's machine, and as a customer rather than as an employee (where work-for-hire laws might apply), he should be the owner of the output.
It could also raise the possibility of someone like Microsoft sneaking in a clause in their EULA (which nobody ever reads) claiming that anything produced with MS Word is actually copyrighted to Microsoft and you, the end user, merely have a license to use it... But I'd like to see that farce try to fly in court.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am a philosopher, and I disapprove of all intellectual property laws in general.
There were definitely similarities. Maybe more than I ever saw, since I only played the first Halo game. I could easily imagine both Halo and Marathon taking place in the same universe.
Though the two are now both officially and, even if that weren't so, obviously not set in the same universe anymore, those of us who have been following Bungie closely since they were seven guys working out of a basement in Chicago know that Halo was once (well before release) actually set in the Marathon universe explicitly. Master Chief was the Security Officer, the UNSC was the UESC, the Forerunners were the Jjaro, and the Covenant were the successors/leftovers of the Pfhor empire.
Now, however, Halo is a mere "spiritual sequel" to Marathon, nothing more... and probably for the better, as MS now has no stake in the Marathon franchise, now that Bungie is free again.
They made a Windows version of Marathon 2 back in '96, and the full trilogy is now playable via the open-source continuation of the Marathon engine, called Aleph One..
I wouldn't mind a refresh of the original Marathon. Upgrade the engine and graphics but keep the game play and sounds, other than converting to true surround sound. Was totally creepy playing that at 3am, even with just a stereo setup.
Then vsit Marathon Open Source to download an updated version of the Marathon engine, all three original games in formats compatible with the updated engine (free and legal), and a variety of graphical enhancements (high-res walls, weapons, basically everything but the monsters) created by the fans over the years.
Also, while you're at it download my own 52-level unofficial sequel to the Marathon Trilogy, complete with all-new hi-res goodness just like the originals now have: Eternal. Also highly recommended: Marathon: Rubicon, another unofficial sequel.
I did not miss that. That is NOT the exact opposite. He said a consensus of EXPERTS in LAW would be necessary to make one lawyer's opinion more important than anothers. Then he provides a consensus of 15 self-expressed math experts? So math expert = lawyer?
Emphasis mine. I read him as saying that a consensus of experts in law would be sufficient to establish one lawyer's credibility, not that it would be necessary. Other things may also be sufficient - and he seems to be suggesting that this consensus of self-expressed math experts is sufficient.
Of course, we're not dealing in strict deductive argument here, so sufficiency isn't quite black and white. The consensus of self-expressed math experts may lend some credibility to said lawyer, without establishing it with certainty; a consensus of experts in law may lend even more credibility, still without establishing it with certainty. Outside of pure math very little can ever be established with certainty.
So what you're saying is, somewhere in the heavens, they are waiting? o8-)
I see a lot of debate here about XML versus SGML (or SGML-like) serialization and parsing rules, and plenty of people (rightly) pointing out that there is an XML version of HTML 5.
But what about those features which those of us who already code strictly to spec either way really care about? New elements that were scheduled to debut in XHTML 2.0 such as nl, h and section, the ability to put href and src attributes in any element, etc?
Those are the sorts of things which made the debate for me, not some silly XML vs SGML, strict vs lenient debate - either way I'll be writing my code for strict compliance with spec. I'm more concerned with what the features of the spec will be! Less so with how it deals with people out of compliance with it.
So any news on whether X/HTML 5 will be incorporating any of these, now that it's a W3C project and XHTML 2 is dead?
Aw frack me, I included an anchor in that previous link. Here it is again, corrected.
XHTML 2 is way cooler anyway. Why does anybody give a damn about HTML 5?
Side by side comparison of the two.
Also: why does Slashdot's extrans mode no longer seem to work? Having to include P tags in full HTML mode is annoying, and plaintext doesn't support links.
I ask an honest question, you call me names, and you call my "assertion" (there was no such thing in my post) a "failure".
Congratulations, you are my first Foe, asshat.
I know this is a tangential question, but I've been wondering about this for a while, and this seems like the best forum to get a decent answer from intelligent people:
Why is all the development on electric and electric-hybrid cars going into fancy new systems with lithium ion batteries or hydrogen fuel cells and (for hybrids) complicated switching between a conventional drive train and electric motors, instead of using and improving upon the time-tested diesel-electric technology which has efficiently powered many trains for quite some time now?
Build a simple all-electric car - just a body, steering rack, four wheels with a dynamo on each (there's your propulsion and your regenerative brakes), some circuity to control them all, and a small battery that holds just enough charge to get you up to speed, maybe twice that for a safety margin. Then stick the most efficient diesel or gas generator you've got in it to provide electricity to keep the battery charged. You lose a bunch of weight and mechanical complexity by ditching most of the drive train and transmission system for some simple wiring between the generator and the dynamos; the alternator and the standard car battery become redundant with the generator and main battery; heck you could even replace the radiator with a small steam engine for still increased efficiency, turning that excess heat into electricity instead of just disposing of it to the air.
Yes, it still uses some fossil fuels, but in the end most of our electricity comes from coal anyway (even for a wall-charged all-electric vehicle like the Model S here, which I am very excited about). This just seems like it would have been far cheaper, more efficient (in terms of both money and thermodynamics), and simpler a solution than the complicated hybrids they've been building for a while now; plus the technology has already existed in widespread use on trains for decades!
So why isn't anybody doing it in cars? Is there a good technical or economic reason?
Shit, I should learn to use preview. That should be:
<quote>"No one knows what is better for the people than the people themselves" and "The people <strong>do not</strong> know what is best for themselves" are not contrary propositions.</quote>
"No one knows what is better for the people than the people themselves" and "The people know what is best for themselves" are not contrary propositions. One can hold (like the GP) that the people know fuck-all about what's best for them, and still hold (like you) that having some elite minority rule over the common people would probably produce worse results than majority rule.
Or to put it in a simpler analogy: I, in all probability, know what's good for me better than anybody else does; but that doesn't mean I'm not a moron who's going to run my life into the ground.
I don't really agree that "list all" can be legally satisfied by "list none" (the polar opposite) if one of the items isn't able to be listed.
If that's boggling your mind, get this one. The following is absolutely true: <strong>All of my children are under the age of nine, <em>and</em> none of my children are under the age of nine.</strong> How is this possible?
I have no children.
In a strict logical sense, "all As are Bs" is equivalent to "no As are non-Bs". ('all' and 'none' are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan_dual">De Morgan dual</a>). So to say that "all of my children are under the age of nine" is to say that "none of my children are aged nine or older". If I have no children, then that is true: every last one of my zero children is under the age of nine. However, so is any other "all" or "none" statement about my children, including "none of my children are under the age of nine".
The more common colloquial usage of "all As are Bs" is to say that <em>some</em> things are As, AND that no As are non-Bs. But in strict formal logic, you need to explicitly state the additional fact that there are some As; just saying that all of them are Bs doesn't necessarily imply that there are any of them at all.
This bit of logic is not quite the root of the "any and all" confusion here, but for how unreasonable the law can be, legalese certainly has some nice logical rigor to it.
And if you think these kinds of things are fun, I encourage you to look into the difference between "if" and "only if", and consequently why "if and only if" is not redundant.
Then I wonder why it is used to treat ADHD? I always assumed that people with that condition needed less stimulation
As I recall, people with AD(H)D have somewhat reversed reactions to stimulants and depressants. I think it has something to do with a part of the brain responsible for regulating the activity of the rest of the brain being under-active in such people. Stimulants increase the all-over brain activity levels, and that under-active part then reigns in the rest more than it usually would. The opposite happens with depressants.
Regardless of whether that is the correct explanation, I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to be convinced myself. Plenty of friends diagnosed ADHD who have such reactions. An ex-girlfriend of mine was actually prescribed a cup of coffee every morning as early as kindergarten. (Her kindergarten teacher protested, her mom eventually conceded, and sent her to school uncaffeinated; the next day, she came home with a note from her teacher requesting that she be properly caffeinated from now on). As an adult, alcohol would make her hyper, not groggy.
Having being diagnosed ADD myself as a young child, I've noticed similar effects on myself; a nice cup of chai or a Mountain Dew would chill me out, and alcohol would wire me up. Oddly enough, now that I'm on Prozac, they have the opposite (i.e. normal effects); alcohol makes me drunk, caffeine makes me hyper, etc.
Eggses, precious. Eggses in its pocketses.
You seem to have missed this bit from my post (I'll emphasize the important part):
Software is something of genuine market value (in any country that has effective copyright laws to create artificial scarcity, at least)
I don't believe in the moral legitimacy of intellectual property; in fact I hold that intellectual property rights are logically incompatible with physical property rights, and the latter take precedence. However, the whole damn credit market is dealing in largely imaginary goods anyway (although slightly more real than "intellectual" goods), so if we're working within that system anyway, using one to solve the other doesn't seem any worse. Also, my proposal doesn't require any of the US's more draconian IP laws, just basic copyright law of any sort, like most of the civilized world already has (for better or for worse).
I know this is supposed to be a joke, and I'm sick today so maybe my brain isn't working quite right... but something actually seems rather insightful about this suggestion.
Software is something of genuine market value (in any country that has effective copyright laws to create artificial scarcity, at least) that can be reproduced virtually for free. Seems like the perfect thing to get someone out of debt. Invest in it once and then rake in the dough.
Perhaps the US Gov't could arrange licences with certain highly successful software companies to trade *them* (the software companies) treasury bonds in exchange for licences to distribute those highly successful software packages (perhaps only internationally, reserving the domestic market to the private sector). Use the proceeds from that to pay down foreign debt. That still leaves the US Gov't with debt to some major US companies, which is a less than ideal situation, but certainly preferable to debt to foreign states: at least when that debt gets paid off, the money goes to business in the US, and therefrom to the employees of those businesses, and back around into the US economy.
If there was nothing more important, why would it be in the first amendment, instead of in, say, the original constitution itself?
Because the original constitution was written on the premise that people had every right that the constitution didn't explicitly give government the power to curtail. Note the language there; the constitution grants powers to the government (which otherwise has none), not rights to the people (who otherwise have all of them). It was feared that explicitly enumerating rights might imply that such a list was exhaustive, ruling out any rights not listed.
The Bill of Rights was only added because many states only agreed to ratify the constitution once such a bill of rights was promised to be added. The ninth and tenth amendments were the compromise added to quell the fears of the list being taken as exhaustive (the ninth explicitly stating that the list of people's rights is not exhaustive, and the tenth explicitly stating that the list of the Federal government's powers is exhaustive).
And of the rights people were worried about explicitly enumerating, freedom of speech (and the press, and religion, and assembly, all bundled together) was priority #1.
Seriously. This has nothing to do with morality. It is a question about ethics.
"Ethics" is the study of morality. "Ethical" and "moral" are synonyms. In what way do you understand the two terms such that they represent distinct concepts?
In Europe (actually, most places outside the US) we write DD-MM-YYYY or similar (DD/MM/YYYY, DD.MM.YYYY etc). This seems more logical to me, as days are smaller than months, and months are smaller than years.
In Japan, and in ISO date format, it's YYYY-MM-DD.
I much prefer the ISO format (and Japanese? interesting) because with most other numbers, including times, we write the most significant digits to the left. Three hundreds, two tens, and a one is written "321". Twelve hours, thirty-four minutes and fifty-six seconds is written "12:34:56". So it just makes sense that dates such as "In the two-thousand-ninth year, in the third month, on the fourteenth day" would be written "2009-03-14". So the American month-day format makes sense, but we just got stupid and wrote the year after it instead of before it. You Europeans on the other hand are consistent, but backward. (Although now that I write that elongated form, it does feel somewhat backward, even to my American ears; "the fourteenth day of the third month of the year two-thousand-nine" seems much more natural).
In the ISO format, as you are probably aware, this left-to-right date notation dovetails nicely with the time notation, e.g. it is currently 2009-03-14T19:36:03 as I write this. (Year 2009, Month 3, Day 14, Hour 19, Minute 36, Second 3).
2/7 is the 2nd of July (or July 2nd, in American).
Actually, in American English either of the written-out versions is acceptable (we celebrate "the Fourth of July", for instance), because either is unambiguous. Only in the abbreviated form does order matter, since which figure refers to to months and which to days is ambiguous if not for convention.
considering that 22/7 is closer to pi than 3.14, I think it's definitely rather more than less.
Actually, it's not.
pi = 3.14159265358979... (yes, that is from memory)
22/7 = 3.142857142857... (that is from my calculator)
Just ONE DIGIT past 3.14 and 22/7 is already less accurate. (pi = 3.142... while 22/7 = 3.143...). Furthermore, if you're dealing with measured numbers at all and need to keep track of significant figures (not like you'd be using memorized approximations of pi in such an instance anyway), 3.14 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/100 (that is, 3.14 is somewhere between 3.13 and 3.15), where 22/7 states its value to a precision of plus or minus 1/7 (that is, 22/7 is somewhere between 21/7 [or 3], and 23/7 [or 3.29]). So not only is 3.14 more accurate at it's precision than 22/7 at the same precision, but 3.14 is more precise than 22/7 as well.
why does Quicktime get accepted, when it's far more annoying, invasive
Because on the Mac it's not, and most people championing Apple are Mac users. From what I hear about QuickTime, iTunes, etc on Windows, it sounds atrocious, and I can't imagine how Apple can stand having something so horrible tarnish their "it just works" image.
and you even have to pay for basic functionality such as full screen mode
This has always pissed me off though, and until OSX I kept to an older version of QuickTime Player that didn't have that disabled. (QuickTime is not a player application but a whole media framework: file formats, codecs, APIs, etc. QuickTime Player, any version, calls on the underlying QuickTime API to handle everything; so sticking to the old Player while updating the framework didn't have any negative side effects).
Don't worry, with a cheesy title like that, someone's bound to pick it up soon and make a video of what you've expected to see. Pirate porn... mmm... "Come here, wench! Yarrr!"
Already exists.
Copyright law has various parameters that must be met before something is considered a "creative work" under the legislation. A short essay would probably meet the criteria, a two sentence post is likely to fall short of being considered a "creative work". And that is before you even need to worry about any notion of "fair use".
Can you cite those parameters from somewhere? Because in my multimedia arts program we had a class especially on licensing and distribution issues, and the way it was put to us was that an 'X' scratched on a piece of paper is instantly copyrighted. Heck, not playing an instrument can be copyrighted.