Something to keep in mind: part of the production cost of "Walking with Dinosaurs" was probably paid with money from licensing the show to the Discovery Channel, which does have commercials. *Red Dwarf* and other BBC series are partially subsidized by selling licenses to American PBS stations (which are mostly viewer-supported, and do not have advertizing). Same is true with US productions - they are probably gettings some licensing money from BBC and your TV tax, and certainly are getting some licensing money from your independent stations. Things are very complex.
The test for libel of a public figure (and though MS is a corporation, it is a legal person, and probably would be treated as a "public figure" for the purposes of libel law - but I am not a lawyer) by a journalist is pretty stringent: either deliberate falsification or reckless disregard for the truth. If MS goes after PBS with a claim that Cringely is libelling them, they'll have to prove that Cringely's accusation is false, AND that Cringely either knew or didn't care it was false. So if there's even a hint of truth here (and Cringely is citing court documents, so the plausible truth test may be satisfied by definition), MS likely would have no chance of winning on the merits. Now, they could try outlasting PBS money wise - after all, MS has a lot more money than PBS does - but if they try that, this information will get VERY widely disseminated, and will stain their reputation far more than the actual article has done. So it's not in MS's best interests to sue Cringely or PBS - far better to just respond by saying "we're disappointed that Mr. Cringely would choose to report the opposing party's position in a pending law suit without providing a responsible representation of our position, but as a successful world-wide company we've grown used to envy masquerading itself as righteousness." And the whole thing blows over yet again.
Unless, that is, Burst has enough evidence to win.
TAN: In some humanities departments, graduate students are a financial liability. In English departments, however, they teach all the required composition classes for freshmen, at much lower cost than a full-time or even adjunct faculty.
Only cowards use the overrated mod on a posting that hasn't been modded up. If you honestly believe my posting deserves to be modded down, use a mod that will be metamodded.
The reason this vote is important it because it helps to expose a common thread in current Republican methodology regarding government commitments: take on a big job, but promise you can do the job with a minimum of resources. Pay for the war without raising taxes - just push off fulfillment of the commitment to a later administration or even generation. Fight the war without losing a lot of troops - just send the absolute minimum credible force into the conflict, and whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE your approach to adapt to changes in theater. It's ok if there's a big mess: either a miracle will occur and everything will end up ok, or someone else in the future can deal with the problem and take the hit for fulfilling the commitment. Let's call it the BORROW-AND-SPEND approach to military deployment.
The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.
The Administration is making a big deal about a "war against terror," but they seem to think they can fight this war the same way they would have fought the Soviets: with high-tech weapons from a safe distance. The problems in Iraq and other countries that serve as breeding grounds for terror are more akin to street crime than strategic warfare: you're dealing with individuals with guns and bombs who can easily slip into the general population to hide, and then slip back out to attack. The best approach would be the military equivalent to community policing: having lots of troops on the ground for a while who can learn to understand the community well enough to distinguish the people and events that don't belong. You don't improve community policing by developing a new high-tech police helicopter or radio dispatch system: you do it by training and deploying more cops.
For a military deployment, that's a nasty issue: either we have to dramatically increase recruitment (more money, more benefits) or we have to find another way to increase troop levels.
If we're going to solve the terrorism problem militarily, we're going to need a LOT more troops. We can get them from strong alliances with allies willing to commit a lot of troops (ideally those who won't be seen as complete strangers in the countries where we're fighting terrorism), or we can get them from a draft. If we stick with the Bush administration's go-it-almost-alone approach to national security, we're going to need a draft.
But the Republicans won't tell you how they're going to pay for this - how they're going to pay for it with dollars or how they're going to pay for it with lives.
Now if only the Democrats had a candidate with backbone.
This is irrelevant to the discussion. The point of the discussion isn't whether or not it is appropriate for us to allow "natural selection" to operate unimpeded upon us as a species, but only whether or not it has in the past. The fact is that our technology is developing at a rate at which we will be capable of implementing other forms of evolution that will not require "natural selection." But nice try at muddying the waters there.
For the purposes of a discussion about natural selection, the cause that matters is the introduction of an environmental factor that selects out the majority of individual specimens of a species but leaves a small minority of mutated individuals intact. What factor in society led to the introduction of that environmental factor is irrelevant to the argument's value as an argument in favor of natural selection.
Ah, so evolution by natural selection is fact - you're just arguing that MACRO-evolution isn't? Are you familiar with the saying "save the phenomenon?"
When dealing with the "evolution is a religiuos belief" idiots, it's important for you not to give them this kind of ground on their sophistic confusion of science and faith. There's an important distinction between religion, which deals with the non-falsifiable, and science, which deals with the falsifiable. Read some Popper.
On the issue of evolution itself: the moment a Creationist asks for another antibiotic because they have a resistant bacterial infection, they are dealing with natural selection in real time. Disbelief in evolution won't save you from its effects.
This entire thread should be slapped as "TROLL" - none of you READ THE FSCKING ARTICLE.
CONSERVATIVE political newcomer Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level.
Because they assumed that only a small percentage of users would actually use that 250 MB; in other words, they assumed they could get away with promising 250 MB but have consumers only use maybe 10 MB. Rather like ISPs do with bandwidth: if I have 5 Gbps bandwidth, and I have 10,000 customers, what bandwidth do I promise them? 500 kbps? No, of course not, I promise them 3 Mbps, and if they all try to use it at once, I say "we did not anticipate this level of demand." I'm not saying it's right, of course, just saying that it's not an uncommon practice.
Copyright also controls how a work is performed. See Section 106, and note paragraph 5:
106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Do we censor sex? Certain kinds of violence? Sure. But most of that is not meaningful political censorship in the sense we have here. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not free speech, either. To say that we have "government censorship" in the context of what they're doing in China is ludicrous.
I don't think the US governnment has meaningful "prior restraint" censorship of political news, which is what most folks are talking about when they refer to "censorship". I do think that the television networks will sometimes hold back on stories at the request of an administration because they want to continue a good working relationship with that administration, but they make those decisions themselves, and will happily do things against the administration's wishes if they think the benefits outweigh the consequences.
Take a look at the Rather mess: if we had any kind of meaningful government censorship in the US, those files would not have been released; *Farenheit 9/11* wouldn't have been released.
Imagine that someone took the source code to the Linux kernel, modified it heavily, gave every command a fake Finnish sound to it, and released it for $50 a pop as "Finux" WITHOUT releasing the source or doing anything else to satisfy the GPL provisions. If you think what this theater troup is doing is fair use parody, "Finux" would be legal. If you think the GPL would prevent someone from releasing Finux without following the provisions of the GPL, then what this theater group is doing is not fair use parody.
The problem is that this probably doesn't qualify as a parody under the common law. This is probably characterized as a derivative work, with the video from the film being combined with parodizing content, and so is not protected by fair use provisions. But IANAL.
Copyright is the right to control how a work is presented and who gets to see it. By using the film without sound as part of their theater work, the theater group was including the film in a derivative work, and copyright very explicitly covers use in derivative works. If it didn't, the GPL wouldn't work!!!
Slashdot Mirror
It uses a Transmeta processor. Linus used to work for Transmeta. = News for Nerds (at least in some eyes).
The only folks I've seen talking about "no warranty" clauses are SCO and Microsoft.
Something to keep in mind: part of the production cost of "Walking with Dinosaurs" was probably paid with money from licensing the show to the Discovery Channel, which does have commercials. *Red Dwarf* and other BBC series are partially subsidized by selling licenses to American PBS stations (which are mostly viewer-supported, and do not have advertizing). Same is true with US productions - they are probably gettings some licensing money from BBC and your TV tax, and certainly are getting some licensing money from your independent stations. Things are very complex.
Unless, that is, Burst has enough evidence to win.
Me. 23 GB of music, and I could use the extra 37 GB for other kinds of storage.
TAN: In some humanities departments, graduate students are a financial liability. In English departments, however, they teach all the required composition classes for freshmen, at much lower cost than a full-time or even adjunct faculty.
If only. The luckiest woman in the world: Howard Stern's cohost on that trip. Not.
Only cowards use the overrated mod on a posting that hasn't been modded up. If you honestly believe my posting deserves to be modded down, use a mod that will be metamodded.
The reason this vote is important it because it helps to expose a common thread in current Republican methodology regarding government commitments: take on a big job, but promise you can do the job with a minimum of resources. Pay for the war without raising taxes - just push off fulfillment of the commitment to a later administration or even generation. Fight the war without losing a lot of troops - just send the absolute minimum credible force into the conflict, and whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE your approach to adapt to changes in theater. It's ok if there's a big mess: either a miracle will occur and everything will end up ok, or someone else in the future can deal with the problem and take the hit for fulfilling the commitment. Let's call it the BORROW-AND-SPEND approach to military deployment.
The former U.S. official who governed Iraq after the invasion said yesterday that the United States made two major mistakes: not deploying enough troops in Iraq and then not containing the violence and looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, administrator for the U.S.-led occupation government until the handover of political power on June 28, said he still supports the decision to intervene in Iraq but said a lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting early on.
The Administration is making a big deal about a "war against terror," but they seem to think they can fight this war the same way they would have fought the Soviets: with high-tech weapons from a safe distance. The problems in Iraq and other countries that serve as breeding grounds for terror are more akin to street crime than strategic warfare: you're dealing with individuals with guns and bombs who can easily slip into the general population to hide, and then slip back out to attack. The best approach would be the military equivalent to community policing: having lots of troops on the ground for a while who can learn to understand the community well enough to distinguish the people and events that don't belong. You don't improve community policing by developing a new high-tech police helicopter or radio dispatch system: you do it by training and deploying more cops.
For a military deployment, that's a nasty issue: either we have to dramatically increase recruitment (more money, more benefits) or we have to find another way to increase troop levels.
If we're going to solve the terrorism problem militarily, we're going to need a LOT more troops. We can get them from strong alliances with allies willing to commit a lot of troops (ideally those who won't be seen as complete strangers in the countries where we're fighting terrorism), or we can get them from a draft. If we stick with the Bush administration's go-it-almost-alone approach to national security, we're going to need a draft.
But the Republicans won't tell you how they're going to pay for this - how they're going to pay for it with dollars or how they're going to pay for it with lives.
Now if only the Democrats had a candidate with backbone.
However, it is worth noting that Cooper's flight was orbital, and the X-15s were not. Who was the last man to go into orbit alone? Cooper?
This is irrelevant to the discussion. The point of the discussion isn't whether or not it is appropriate for us to allow "natural selection" to operate unimpeded upon us as a species, but only whether or not it has in the past. The fact is that our technology is developing at a rate at which we will be capable of implementing other forms of evolution that will not require "natural selection." But nice try at muddying the waters there.
1. 92%
5. 1% - one CD, and I'm planning on buying it soon.
For the purposes of a discussion about natural selection, the cause that matters is the introduction of an environmental factor that selects out the majority of individual specimens of a species but leaves a small minority of mutated individuals intact. What factor in society led to the introduction of that environmental factor is irrelevant to the argument's value as an argument in favor of natural selection.
Ah, so evolution by natural selection is fact - you're just arguing that MACRO-evolution isn't? Are you familiar with the saying "save the phenomenon?"
When dealing with the "evolution is a religiuos belief" idiots, it's important for you not to give them this kind of ground on their sophistic confusion of science and faith. There's an important distinction between religion, which deals with the non-falsifiable, and science, which deals with the falsifiable. Read some Popper.
On the issue of evolution itself: the moment a Creationist asks for another antibiotic because they have a resistant bacterial infection, they are dealing with natural selection in real time. Disbelief in evolution won't save you from its effects.
This entire thread should be slapped as "TROLL" - none of you READ THE FSCKING ARTICLE.
CONSERVATIVE political newcomer Family First wants an annual levy of $7 to $10 on all internet users to fund a $45 million mandatory national internet filtering scheme aimed at blocking pornographic and offensive content at server level.
"CONSERVATIVE" and "LEFT WING" are antithetical.
Why the hell is parent still stuck at +2? Insightful, Informative, and Funny in that dark sort of way all at once.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Bogart say practically the same thing to the Epstein brothers?
You haven't noticed that the music from commercials and shows overlap one another on TV yet, have you?
Because they assumed that only a small percentage of users would actually use that 250 MB; in other words, they assumed they could get away with promising 250 MB but have consumers only use maybe 10 MB. Rather like ISPs do with bandwidth: if I have 5 Gbps bandwidth, and I have 10,000 customers, what bandwidth do I promise them? 500 kbps? No, of course not, I promise them 3 Mbps, and if they all try to use it at once, I say "we did not anticipate this level of demand." I'm not saying it's right, of course, just saying that it's not an uncommon practice.
Copyright also controls how a work is performed. See Section 106, and note paragraph 5:
106. Exclusive rights in copyrighted works
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
(2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;
(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly;
(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; and
(6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
Do we censor sex? Certain kinds of violence? Sure. But most of that is not meaningful political censorship in the sense we have here. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is not free speech, either. To say that we have "government censorship" in the context of what they're doing in China is ludicrous.
I don't think the US governnment has meaningful "prior restraint" censorship of political news, which is what most folks are talking about when they refer to "censorship". I do think that the television networks will sometimes hold back on stories at the request of an administration because they want to continue a good working relationship with that administration, but they make those decisions themselves, and will happily do things against the administration's wishes if they think the benefits outweigh the consequences.
Take a look at the Rather mess: if we had any kind of meaningful government censorship in the US, those files would not have been released; *Farenheit 9/11* wouldn't have been released.
Imagine that someone took the source code to the Linux kernel, modified it heavily, gave every command a fake Finnish sound to it, and released it for $50 a pop as "Finux" WITHOUT releasing the source or doing anything else to satisfy the GPL provisions. If you think what this theater troup is doing is fair use parody, "Finux" would be legal. If you think the GPL would prevent someone from releasing Finux without following the provisions of the GPL, then what this theater group is doing is not fair use parody.
The problem is that this probably doesn't qualify as a parody under the common law. This is probably characterized as a derivative work, with the video from the film being combined with parodizing content, and so is not protected by fair use provisions. But IANAL.
Copyright is the right to control how a work is presented and who gets to see it. By using the film without sound as part of their theater work, the theater group was including the film in a derivative work, and copyright very explicitly covers use in derivative works. If it didn't, the GPL wouldn't work!!!