And nothing the poster said was really specific to books. In the case of Gladiator, the library STILL doesn't copy the DVD and give it to you. Still the physical copy being lent out.
You can't violate copyright law if you don't copy something.*
* Note: This is a lie; you can, but not in the portions that are under discussion here.
I had an interesting run-in with Benford's law a bit ago. I had this typed up already, so here goes (description of the law omitted; read the Wikipedia link in the parent -- it's really cool):
You see, my hard drive crashed about two weeks ago. It had three partitions on it, and two of them are still perfectly readable. The third is pretty well shot. (Fortunately, it was the most useless partition; it's main contents was Windows itself. This does mean ANOTHER Windows installation -- after having to do one a few weeks before -- but really that's no biggie compared with my actual data. And while I'm on that subject, I had two hard drives; when I got the newer one, I put all my work stuff on it as well as a new Linux installation specifically because it was less likely to fail, and I look back at that decision now with great happiness, because it is that foresight that has made this no big deal at all.)
I've been trying to recover data off of the third partition, and it seems that if you do a full scan of the partition it appears as if the data was just deleted. Most of the time it's able to recover information, but not always: folder names are often lost. They show up in the recovery programs I tried as just Folder2393 for example. (Numbers ranged from 2 to 5 digits.)
The folder numbers approximately follow Benford's law.
Here is the approximate distribution: (M. S. Digit) (% of folders) (Ideal Benford %) 1 32 30.1 2 15 17.6 3 12 12.5 4 12 9.7 5 19 7.9 6 03 6.7 7 03 5.8 8 02 5.1 9 02 4.6
You know, RESEARCH would usually be good. I should stop talking out of my ass. See, I was thinking that the premise was that you'd be frozen before you're dead so that when you were woken they could fix whatever was wrong with you. I doubt even in the future we'll see true reanimation, so putting a corpse in cryo doesn't make much sense.
In retrospect, OF COURSE it works the way you say; I know enough law (though IANAL I've played one in Mock Trial and done some reading) that I should have known that I've never seen an exception to, say, assault or murder for putting someone in cryo, and that the person's consent isn't a defense (except I guess now in Oregon under very set conditions of euthanasia).
Ignoring the whole issue of whether a soul exists and its nature, you don't understand what cryogenics is. People in cryo are not DEAD, so reviving them isn't resurrecting them. By the theory you state, the soul would never leave the first body.
Just supporting IE 5 will probably get you most users. IME, most users of Opera and Firefox have IE to fall back to if their prefered browser doesn't work.
That doesn't mean they WILL fall back to it. Your site usually has to be pretty special for someone to do that. (Stuff like the IE Tab extension in Firefox lower the boundary a little, but I still think most users are more likely to just move on to another site.)
Well, actually, invading Irak was a big source of "aid and confort" for anti-US terrorism worldwide.
You have to do more than provide aid and comfort. I'm not sure entirely what was meant by "adhering to their enemies", but that seems to be just as important. The most likely definition seems to be "To remain devoted to or be in support of something", so it would have required Bush to actually support the Iraqis in thought and motivation, not just in action.
IANAL and don't know of how that clause has been interpreted, but that's my reading.
Agreed. Here's the definition of treason, from the Constitution:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Even if you disagree with Bush (and there's good reason to), I think you're going to have a *very hard time* arguing that he's done either of those things.
Are you arguing that "equal protection" requires that all states have the same laws?
Not that states have the same laws -- that states are restricted by the same things that the Federal government is, i.e. that they cannot abridge freedom of speech, press, religion, etc.
Before the 14th amendment, states were perfectly free to, say, establish a state religion. Or sieze property without compensation.
The rights afforded by the Bill of Rights were only extended (and not completely!) to the states through SCOTUS cases starting in the late 1800s which used the 14th amendment as the basis.
I'd rather have something tried & true than a fancy new magnetic induction doohicky
Not bashing your overall point, but induction brakes ARE in common use in amusement parks and should be essentially failsafe.
However, they, on their own, are mostly insufficient. It's probably possible to make them good enough that if you fall to the bottom of the shaft with only the induction brake working, you'll be going slow enough that you'll not be killed, but the brakes won't STOP the car, so you'd need mechanical brakes too.
That said, having both induction brakes and mechanical brakes is a good idea. Redundant safety is always a good thing. I think keeping the same level as conventional elevators would be a good goal. So if you drop the counterweight in conventional elevators, adding induction brakes would be a good idea.
Of course, this whole discussion is pretty much moot (how can "moot" have two meanings that are pretty much the complete opposite?), as you'd probably have to try pretty hard to design a maglev elevator that didn't give you induction braking for free. (Okay, actually it isn't; make the car's magnets electromagnets. But that'd give two very significant downsides for no real benefit I can think of.)
Even assuming that there isn't a cable and counterweight in these (the article doesn't say one way or the other), I think I'd feel *safer* in a maglev based elevator if the power went out than I would in a conventional elevator if the cable failed.
I can almost gurantee that, at least if this doesn't have a counterweight, the way this works is that the elevator car has large permanent magnets that pass over metal fins in the wall. These fins could normally provide the propulsion, but in the case of electrical failure, you have a mechanism that will slow the car to a fairly slow speed that's almost completely failsafe. There are about 3 things that could go wrong:
1. The car's magnets lose their magnetism. But this would be very hard to do, take a long time, and could be detected easily.
2. The fins get distorted, and the car no longer passes freely over them. This is the most likely problem.
3. The computer that controls the current to the fins -- if that's indeed what's being used for propulsion -- malfunctions or is tampered with so that it essentially propels the car down.
That's it.
As long as the magnets pass over the fins, what will happen is that the changing magnetic field (because the car's getting closer) will induce currents in the fins. These currents produce a magnetic field that opposes the original -- and the car's motion.
It's the same braking principle used in amusement parks. You can test it by getting a small metal pipe and a magnet, and dropping the magnet through the tube. You'll see that it falls very slowly. (With a neodymium magnet that fits neatly in about a 1/4" tube, think a couple seconds to fall 10 feet.)
Now, the issue is that power goes out a lot more than elevator cables break... but a backup generator could help there.
I'm not knocking the tech or its use; I think that a maglev elevator has uses, and I'd ride in one without hesitation. (I'd even probably choose the maglev if there was a choice just to check it out.)
All I meant by saying I'd have to look at experiments and stuff was that my intuition says that a counterweight would provide quite a bit more stopping power than induction brakes, so I wouldn't just assume that there are no moving parts.
The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.
I've thought about this a little more (I should do that before posting, but we all know the desire to get something up before someone beats you) and it might not be true. Safety systems currently are probably designed to withstand a cable break, in which case there goes the counterwight's braking power. (Yay for homophones.)
(I STILL think though the benefits of a counterweight outweigh (no pun intended) the additional cost and complexity.)
# Simple, instead of pullies and leavers and motors, your left with a system with no moving parts. Nothing will ever wear out, except the permanent magnets in a long long time # Failure can be handled like todays elevators, clamp to the walls and put the breaks on
You're being inconsistent. The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.
So you either need something new in the maglev elevator, or a counterweight. But if you have a counterweight, you've got at least a pulley.
Now, it's possible that the induction-based brakes I and another poster described would substitute for a counterweight, in which case you could get away with no moving parts, but I'd have to see some experiments and calculations before I would trust it as a replacement.
Probably not. It is probably based on a toned down version of the ride you see at some amusement parks (e.g. the Pit Fall at Kennywood in Pittsburgh). In the Pit Fall, most breaking is done by large permanent magnets that surround metal fins. As the car falls, the magnets induce a current in the fins that oppose the motion.
With the magnets already needed for propulsion, it wouldn't be difficult to add something similar to the elevators.
(Also, there's not enough detail in the article, but there's no reason that you couldn't use almost all the safety features used in traditional elevators in a maglev one.)
Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841), is the earliest US case I've found that establishes Fair Use in the US. It's cited as such, both on a couple informal websites and at least in one later decision. Folsom does not cite the First Amendment. Folsom does not cite the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" clause (properly done it would also require the 10th Amendment). In fact, Folsom doesn't cite The Constitution at all.
However, Folsom DOES cite Dodsley v. Kinnersley, Whittingham v. Wooler, and Tonson v. Walker, three British cases that established Fair Use within English Common law.
Scratch that, I think. After doing a little more reading, it looks like Fair Use was inherited from English common law, and not derived from the first amendment. That said, it's likely that the first amendment would provide some fair use protections, as in the case of criticism or parody.
There are so many problems with that post that it's insane.
If you notice plagiarism in the mainstream media, you are powerless.
Yeah, I mean the Sun Bulletin just shrugged off all of the reports of plagiarism in this case. I wish they had done something to remedy the situation.
Oh wait, they did.
Therefore, Wikipedia is superior to the mainedia.
How does this follow? There are so many other axes than just how difficult it is to plagarize. Accuracy. Bias. Timeliness.
Second, even in the category of plagarism, I'd say that the traditional media has an edge. What happens AFTER you delete the plagarism from Wikipedia? Who's to say that the person who added it in the first place won't do it again? Even if you were to ban their userID, what happens if they just register again under another email address? By contrast, do you think that the Sun Bulletin reporter is gonna work in journalism again?
How 'bout this alternate conclusion: People who plagarize in the mainstream media are held to account, therefore the "mainedia" is superior to Wikipedia.
Slashdot Mirror
And nothing the poster said was really specific to books. In the case of Gladiator, the library STILL doesn't copy the DVD and give it to you. Still the physical copy being lent out.
You can't violate copyright law if you don't copy something.*
* Note: This is a lie; you can, but not in the portions that are under discussion here.
I had an interesting run-in with Benford's law a bit ago. I had this typed up already, so here goes (description of the law omitted; read the Wikipedia link in the parent -- it's really cool):
You see, my hard drive crashed about two weeks ago. It had three partitions on it, and two of them are still perfectly readable. The third is pretty well shot. (Fortunately, it was the most useless partition; it's main contents was Windows itself. This does mean ANOTHER Windows installation -- after having to do one a few weeks before -- but really that's no biggie compared with my actual data. And while I'm on that subject, I had two hard drives; when I got the newer one, I put all my work stuff on it as well as a new Linux installation specifically because it was less likely to fail, and I look back at that decision now with great happiness, because it is that foresight that has made this no big deal at all.)
I've been trying to recover data off of the third partition, and it seems that if you do a full scan of the partition it appears as if the data was just deleted. Most of the time it's able to recover information, but not always: folder names are often lost. They show up in the recovery programs I tried as just Folder2393 for example. (Numbers ranged from 2 to 5 digits.)
The folder numbers approximately follow Benford's law.
Here is the approximate distribution:
(M. S. Digit) (% of folders) (Ideal Benford %)
1 32 30.1
2 15 17.6
3 12 12.5
4 12 9.7
5 19 7.9
6 03 6.7
7 03 5.8
8 02 5.1
9 02 4.6
But then how could I play Defend Your Castle?
You know, RESEARCH would usually be good. I should stop talking out of my ass. See, I was thinking that the premise was that you'd be frozen before you're dead so that when you were woken they could fix whatever was wrong with you. I doubt even in the future we'll see true reanimation, so putting a corpse in cryo doesn't make much sense.
In retrospect, OF COURSE it works the way you say; I know enough law (though IANAL I've played one in Mock Trial and done some reading) that I should have known that I've never seen an exception to, say, assault or murder for putting someone in cryo, and that the person's consent isn't a defense (except I guess now in Oregon under very set conditions of euthanasia).
Ignoring the whole issue of whether a soul exists and its nature, you don't understand what cryogenics is. People in cryo are not DEAD, so reviving them isn't resurrecting them. By the theory you state, the soul would never leave the first body.
Just supporting IE 5 will probably get you most users. IME, most users of Opera and Firefox have IE to fall back to if their prefered browser doesn't work.
That doesn't mean they WILL fall back to it. Your site usually has to be pretty special for someone to do that. (Stuff like the IE Tab extension in Firefox lower the boundary a little, but I still think most users are more likely to just move on to another site.)
I'm almost positive there have been people charged with child porn possession for, e.g., pictures of their kids in the bath.
Just like the DMCA "allows" reverse engineering for security research, and interoperability...
I don't know about other schools, but I don't think I've ever had a programming test since the AP exam. Short one or two line code snippets is all.
(I don't even really know how appropriate it would be to do a skills test like that. Time requirements make it very difficult.)
That makes so much sense. I didn't think about putting the two definitions together like that. Thanks.
Well, actually, invading Irak was a big source of "aid and confort" for anti-US terrorism worldwide.
You have to do more than provide aid and comfort. I'm not sure entirely what was meant by "adhering to their enemies", but that seems to be just as important. The most likely definition seems to be "To remain devoted to or be in support of something", so it would have required Bush to actually support the Iraqis in thought and motivation, not just in action.
IANAL and don't know of how that clause has been interpreted, but that's my reading.
Agreed. Here's the definition of treason, from the Constitution:
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."
Even if you disagree with Bush (and there's good reason to), I think you're going to have a *very hard time* arguing that he's done either of those things.
Are you arguing that "equal protection" requires that all states have the same laws?
Not that states have the same laws -- that states are restricted by the same things that the Federal government is, i.e. that they cannot abridge freedom of speech, press, religion, etc.
Before the 14th amendment, states were perfectly free to, say, establish a state religion. Or sieze property without compensation.
The rights afforded by the Bill of Rights were only extended (and not completely!) to the states through SCOTUS cases starting in the late 1800s which used the 14th amendment as the basis.
I'd rather have something tried & true than a fancy new magnetic induction doohicky
Not bashing your overall point, but induction brakes ARE in common use in amusement parks and should be essentially failsafe.
However, they, on their own, are mostly insufficient. It's probably possible to make them good enough that if you fall to the bottom of the shaft with only the induction brake working, you'll be going slow enough that you'll not be killed, but the brakes won't STOP the car, so you'd need mechanical brakes too.
That said, having both induction brakes and mechanical brakes is a good idea. Redundant safety is always a good thing. I think keeping the same level as conventional elevators would be a good goal. So if you drop the counterweight in conventional elevators, adding induction brakes would be a good idea.
Of course, this whole discussion is pretty much moot (how can "moot" have two meanings that are pretty much the complete opposite?), as you'd probably have to try pretty hard to design a maglev elevator that didn't give you induction braking for free. (Okay, actually it isn't; make the car's magnets electromagnets. But that'd give two very significant downsides for no real benefit I can think of.)
Even assuming that there isn't a cable and counterweight in these (the article doesn't say one way or the other), I think I'd feel *safer* in a maglev based elevator if the power went out than I would in a conventional elevator if the cable failed.
I can almost gurantee that, at least if this doesn't have a counterweight, the way this works is that the elevator car has large permanent magnets that pass over metal fins in the wall. These fins could normally provide the propulsion, but in the case of electrical failure, you have a mechanism that will slow the car to a fairly slow speed that's almost completely failsafe. There are about 3 things that could go wrong:
1. The car's magnets lose their magnetism. But this would be very hard to do, take a long time, and could be detected easily.
2. The fins get distorted, and the car no longer passes freely over them. This is the most likely problem.
3. The computer that controls the current to the fins -- if that's indeed what's being used for propulsion -- malfunctions or is tampered with so that it essentially propels the car down.
That's it.
As long as the magnets pass over the fins, what will happen is that the changing magnetic field (because the car's getting closer) will induce currents in the fins. These currents produce a magnetic field that opposes the original -- and the car's motion.
It's the same braking principle used in amusement parks. You can test it by getting a small metal pipe and a magnet, and dropping the magnet through the tube. You'll see that it falls very slowly. (With a neodymium magnet that fits neatly in about a 1/4" tube, think a couple seconds to fall 10 feet.)
Now, the issue is that power goes out a lot more than elevator cables break... but a backup generator could help there.
I'm not knocking the tech or its use; I think that a maglev elevator has uses, and I'd ride in one without hesitation. (I'd even probably choose the maglev if there was a choice just to check it out.)
All I meant by saying I'd have to look at experiments and stuff was that my intuition says that a counterweight would provide quite a bit more stopping power than induction brakes, so I wouldn't just assume that there are no moving parts.
The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.
I've thought about this a little more (I should do that before posting, but we all know the desire to get something up before someone beats you) and it might not be true. Safety systems currently are probably designed to withstand a cable break, in which case there goes the counterwight's braking power. (Yay for homophones.)
(I STILL think though the benefits of a counterweight outweigh (no pun intended) the additional cost and complexity.)
# Simple, instead of pullies and leavers and motors, your left with a system with no moving parts. Nothing will ever wear out, except the permanent magnets in a long long time
# Failure can be handled like todays elevators, clamp to the walls and put the breaks on
You're being inconsistent. The reason that brakes (Ha! I'll not make the same mistake I did in my last post!) in today's elevators work remotely well is that there's a counterweight. Lose that and probably your safety systems become crap.
So you either need something new in the maglev elevator, or a counterweight. But if you have a counterweight, you've got at least a pulley.
Now, it's possible that the induction-based brakes I and another poster described would substitute for a counterweight, in which case you could get away with no moving parts, but I'd have to see some experiments and calculations before I would trust it as a replacement.
Dangerous failure mode
Probably not. It is probably based on a toned down version of the ride you see at some amusement parks (e.g. the Pit Fall at Kennywood in Pittsburgh). In the Pit Fall, most breaking is done by large permanent magnets that surround metal fins. As the car falls, the magnets induce a current in the fins that oppose the motion.
With the magnets already needed for propulsion, it wouldn't be difficult to add something similar to the elevators.
(Also, there's not enough detail in the article, but there's no reason that you couldn't use almost all the safety features used in traditional elevators in a maglev one.)
That hardly matters though, because the pressure did eventually force them to fire the guy.
Folsom v. Marsh, 9 F.Cas. 342 (1841), is the earliest US case I've found that establishes Fair Use in the US. It's cited as such, both on a couple informal websites and at least in one later decision. Folsom does not cite the First Amendment. Folsom does not cite the "Progress of Science and useful Arts" clause (properly done it would also require the 10th Amendment). In fact, Folsom doesn't cite The Constitution at all.
However, Folsom DOES cite Dodsley v. Kinnersley, Whittingham v. Wooler, and Tonson v. Walker, three British cases that established Fair Use within English Common law.
Scratch that, I think. After doing a little more reading, it looks like Fair Use was inherited from English common law, and not derived from the first amendment. That said, it's likely that the first amendment would provide some fair use protections, as in the case of criticism or parody.
Actually, "fair use" is based on the ol' First Amendment. It was first introduced in the early 1800s.
The ruling that recording "broadcast" TV constitutes fair use however dates to Betamax.
In other words, fair use isn't going anywhere, but the current statute defines it more broadly than the courts require under freedom of speech/press.
There are so many problems with that post that it's insane.
If you notice plagiarism in the mainstream media, you are powerless.
Yeah, I mean the Sun Bulletin just shrugged off all of the reports of plagiarism in this case. I wish they had done something to remedy the situation.
Oh wait, they did.
Therefore, Wikipedia is superior to the mainedia.
How does this follow? There are so many other axes than just how difficult it is to plagarize. Accuracy. Bias. Timeliness.
Second, even in the category of plagarism, I'd say that the traditional media has an edge. What happens AFTER you delete the plagarism from Wikipedia? Who's to say that the person who added it in the first place won't do it again? Even if you were to ban their userID, what happens if they just register again under another email address? By contrast, do you think that the Sun Bulletin reporter is gonna work in journalism again?
How 'bout this alternate conclusion: People who plagarize in the mainstream media are held to account, therefore the "mainedia" is superior to Wikipedia.
Strictly speaking, that only implies that the Star Bulletin plagiarized, and not that Wikipedia didn't.