Batt is simply trying to make the issue go away by making fun of the silence aspect, but Cage's estate does in fact have a point, legally speaking, which has nothing to do with a copyright on silence.
There are four kinds of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and trademarks. The only IP that could apply here is trademarks. As far as trademarks go, if we consider Cage's name a trademark, the attribution of the piece to Cage is entirely accurate. If Batt had copied any of Cage's other pieces, he could also have properly used Cage's name to identify it, but he would have run afoul of copyright. In this case, he is properly using Cage's name to identify the piece, but since there is no content, he isn't running afoul of copyright law either.
However, it's a sad comment on the state of the arts in America that such a simple, whimsical attribution becomes subject to a legal dispute.
If you want to make small pieces of jewelry or other parts, there are metal clays (search on Google): almost pure precious metal (silver, gold) with a little bit of binder. When you heat them, the binder burns away and the metal sticks together.
Other than that, the technique sounds unnecessarily laborious and complex. There are easier ways to melt metal, even at home. Thermite, for example, should appeal to people who like fireworks. Basic textbooks on inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy can tell you how. (Don't people learn this stuff in high school chemistry anymore?)
If he simply left a minute of silence on his album (without the credit) then I'd definitely think that there's nothing there. However, by crediting Cage (even as a joke or a tribute) he has opened himself up to charges of copyright infringement and/or misrepresentation.
That's absurd. You don't infringe someone's copyright or misrepresent them by acknowledging their prior contributions. You infringe someone's copyright by, well, copying their work. Now, leaving a minute of silence is a neat artistic idea, but ideas aren't copyrightable, only expressions of those ideas. And there is simply nothing about a minute of silence as an expression of an idea that is unique--there were plenty of silences everywhere before Cage.
Putting nuclear weapons into space is beneficial to saber rattling US politicians in the short term--that's why they will do it. It isn't beneficial to Americans or the world in the long term. As usual, US politicians take a short-term, politically expedient view. Morality, long-term benefits, and the rest of the world usually don't seem to factor into their considerations.
People want a commercial, supported product when they depoly an enterprise streaming solution. Right or wrong, most people won't consider vlc a large-scale solution.
Many people would consider an open source product if they knew about it. The problem with acceptance of open source software in many businesses has to do with lack of a marketing budget for open source software projects, not with lack of either quality or acceptance.
Given our current record on international treaties, our government will probably declare those null and void when it suits them. I suspect it's going to start with US-deployed space-based lasers and space-based nuclear power for weapons systems, then dual-use nuclear technology ("it's a nuclear rocket, but it makes a mighty fine dirty bomb, too"), and eventually all pretenses are going to fall. And the US is going to do whatever it likes on the moon, if we ever find the money to send more missions there.
However unless the government of Honduras legally sold the rock it should be given back to the government of Honduras
Did the government of Honduras as the US to do this for them? Is the government of Honduras paying for law enforcement work and legal costs? If not, why are we wasting our money on this? Don't our police and legal system have more important things to worry about than whether the Honduran government gets back an expensive paperweight?
First it was the Oath of Allegiance, now a specimen of moon rock - litigation should NOT always be the first resort.
It was the Pledge of Allegiance, not the Oath of Allegiance that was at issue (they are not the same thing).
Who says litigation was the "first resort"? Seems like the last resort, after political efforts to convince our sanctimonious and popularity hungry representatives to change laws that blatantly conflict with separation of church and state have failed.
The Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit was by a private citizen.
I'll give you this much, though: I think the government should not spend its money on chasing down Honduran paperweights. They gave it away as a gift--who cares where it ends up?
A 15 hour cross country trip in a train? Have you even tried to book a train trip...ever?
Sure: I have taken 15h trips across many countries.
In an attempt to save money, I looked to see how much it would cost to take the train to Denver, from the middle of Illinois. Not only did it cost the same, but the train trip would take TWO DAYS.
Current train service in the US sucks. That's because the US government isn't investing enough money in it.
It's about 3000 miles from San Francisco to New York. A current generation high-speed train could easily traverse that in 15h, with time for stops in between. We can probably get that down to under 10h eventually.
Amtrack is loosing money, the airlines are making money. You say that the only reason is because they aren't properly accounting for it's enviromental costs?
That's not quite what I said. But since you bring it up, I suspect both Amtrak and air travel would probably be commercially money losing commercial ventures if all costs were accounted for. The question is which of the two modes of transportation should our government favor.
What are the enviromental costs for a train?
They are considerably lower per passenger mile. That's one of the attractions of rail travel.
Also, don't forget that time is money too. Add in those costs to your calculations.
Time spent on a modern train is productive: an uninterrupted, comfortable stretch of time from the time you get on until the time you get to your destination. Once there, you'll generally feel rested and productive. Time spent on air travel is mostly unproductive: waiting in lines, running around, waiting for luggage, being squeezed into tiny seats. Even flying first class doesn't alleviate many of those problems.
If aliens visit us at random, their visits are distributed according to a Poisson process. The number of visits you see depends only how long you watch, not how long the process has been going on.
It is true, of course, that if we see, say, 1 visit per year (the same spacecraft flying around the planet a few times, resulting in many sightings), there must have been 1 million visits over the last million years, but so what? A million years is a long time.
Of course, more likely, aliens pick planets to visit based on whether they might harbor interesting life forms, which means that the frequency of visits probably has increased greatly over the last hundreds of millions of years.
We didn't visit the moon right at the same time a moon-sivilisation started to use electric signals and the like. The whole point of the article was, that the aliens apparently visited us within the last 55 years, when we got technically adept.
Yes, and the whole point of the article was wrong. If aliens visit at random, they are a Poisson process, and the number of visits you see depends only on length you observe. Civilization, using electricity, etc., enhances the probability of visits over the past 55 years.
The first 64 bit processor in widespread use on the desktop was the Alpha. It even ran Windows NT. How much more "PC world" can you get? It is still being used with Linux.
Furthermore, the G4 is not really a 64 bit processor. The biggest difference between 32 bit and true 64 bit processors is that 64 bit processors use 64 bit pointers.
Apple puts out some nice hardware and software, but they are rarely the first with anything and they don't really do much research anymore either.
The author's calculation is completely spurious. Rather than an elaborate technical explanation, think about it: the same would apply to people traveling to the moon, or even explorers traveling to Antarctica. Both the moon and Antarctica have been around for a long time, what is "the probability that people would actually go there"?
The age of the earth doesn't matter for this kind of calculation. What matters is the propensity for space travel of aliens, the duration of trips, the prevalence of earth-like planets, the expected lifetime of spacefaring civilizations, and the ability of aliens to detect earth-like planets.
Ahh, shit, thats right. Since it *can* explode and the seats may be cramped, lets forget about the cheaper flights and the more environmentally friendly engines, and go ahead and stick with our old version.
What "old version"? There are (almost) no behemoths like that flying right now. Building them creates a new level of risk. And flying each passenger 30% more efficiently than right now still makes matters worse overall if twice as many people end up flying.
Yeah, nothing like a 15 hour cross country trip [in a train] to calm your nerves.
I'd much rather spend 15 hours in a train than 6 hours in an airplane, something that usually turns into 10-12 hours anyway with all the waiting, delays, security, and traffic jams.
And those underwater trains that we can take to Europe sure are fun.
We have plenty of flights to Europe right now. There is no logical reason why we need to make overseas travel ever cheaper. In fact, the only reason why air travel is a cheap as it is is because we aren't properly accounting for its environmental costs.
Imagine that thing crashing into a building or city block. Or even just imagine that thing blowing up. Talk about putting all your eggs into one basket. Talk about the SUV of the sky. And you know that the seats are going to be cramped anyway.
If we need that kind of volume in airplanes, then passenger miles have come to the point where high speed trains make sense: on most routes, they are more economical, more comfortable, and more environmentally friendly.
People who read the review now know of the packaging issue.
No, they don't, because he doesn't even tell us what distribution is running. If I install Gnome2 when it becomes part of the standard RedHat or Debian install, this problem will almost certainly not be present.
Should he not have mentioned a serious problem he encountered in his review?
He should do a review competently. That includes starting out with a clear statement of what he was testing and how he was testing it.
Here's a newsflash for you: people don't care about technical quibbles like this. Imagine going to a new car dealership and finding out that the car you're looking at doesn't come with a Stereo.
Here's a newsflash for you: Gnome2 is the radio, not the car. We know the radio works because we can hook it up to power and it plays music. If you get the radio with your new car and the radio doesn't work, it was installed incorrectly. Sensible people complain to their car dealer about that.
But from a user's perspective, Gnome is Gnome.
There is nothing in the world Gnome developers can do if the Linux distributors screw up the installation. Sensible people complain to the people with the power to fix a problem; venting to some hapless bystander is pointless and aggravating.
And a more perfect example of the kind of geek-superiority
Actually, you just gave us another example of populist cluelessness.
UI designers laugh at lots of things, most of them completely irrelevant. In this case, the author is complaining about some baroque scheme for the theming UI. But theming is optional--you don't need it. People play around with themes when they are bored; it might even be bad if the theme configuration UI is too slick.
Gnome 2 does not come without its problems. I do not have sounds on my Gnome 2. I think that Gnome 2 assumes that you have Gnome 1.4 installed,
That's an issue with packaging, not Gnome2 itself. The same goes for many of the other grips that the author has.
The new version removes the flexibility found on Gnome 1.x and it does not introduce anything really new or spectacularly interesting in its UI design.
If the translation of this is "it has fewer options to confuse users and it didn't change its look or feel significantly so that people don't need retraining", then that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Overall, I didn't see a single substantive or informed criticism in the article. There probably are plenty of things wrong with Gnome2, but we'll have to wait for a more careful write-up of those.
Also, you can't expect too much from any desktop that follows current paradigms. Windows and MacOS have plenty of warts and problems, too. Overall, in my experience, Gnome and KDE are no worse.
Now if they could make a plastic-like material out of a more water resistant polysaccharide like chitin or cellulose, then the environmentalists could start celebrating.
You can: fabrics made from natural fibers, wooden containers, unbleached paper, etc. Cellophane and rayon are made from cellulose and biodegrade. Glass also makes great containers and is environmentally friendly when reused. There are many environmentally friendly natural paints and coatings, often based on milk, minerals, linseed oil, etc. A lot of older plastics also are based to some degree on natural substances: casein formaldehyde (from milk or soybeans), celluloid, cellulose acetate, natural rubber, gum lac, etc. Some of those are probably fairly bio-degradable, but that probably also means that they wear faster.
I don't think we need more materials. What we need is the will to use them. And what we also need is standardization and reuse of containers in general.
Just because it biodegrades, doesn't make it an environmental godsend.
That's true. But from the brief description in the article, it sounds like this stuff really is pretty environmentally friendly. Among other things, it seems to be composed only of carbohydrates.
And if you're going shopping, try the bulk section and bring your own REUSABLE cloth bags.
People won't do that without financial incentives. Perhaps recycling taxes on plastic bags and higher landfill costs could incentivize people; the proceeds could be used for public eduation campaigns.
the real terrorists are governments and media
on
Cyber-Attacks?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Government experts and the media are bombarding us with possible scenarios: smallpox sprayed from crop dusters, terrorist attacks shutting down our stock markets, dirty bombs in New York harbor, nuclear missiles raining down from God-knows-where, etc.
Why do they do that? Certainly not to improve our life expectancy or security. If we wanted to do that, spending $280 billion on public health and education would save a lot more lives than a missile defense system even in the unlikely event that we were attacked and that the system worked. If we are worried about attacks on our financial system, stopping crooks like Enron and WorldCom executives would be a whole lot less trouble and costly, not to mention less threatening to our civil liberties; Osama sending a Microsoft Word virus out of his cave pales in comparison to what a single felonious US executive can achieve.
No, people create fear in order to gain power. That's true for Afghan terrorists as much as for the US government and the media. Creating fear gives people power and it allows politicians to move billions of dollars to their favorite campaign contributors.
Folks, life is dangerous: live with it. And learn to evaluate risks and spend dollars wisely on prevention. Nearly 50000 people die each year in the US in traffic accidents, more Americans than in the entire Vietnam War. Cars cause even more deaths each year from pollution. Smoking causes 440000 premature deaths each year. Obesity causes about 280000 premature deaths each year. (Data comes mostly from JAMA.) Those are all easily preventable, with better education, reduced stress, and a better transportation infrastructure. Instead, however, we get worked up about obscure threats and spend enormous amounts of money on anti-terrorist measures and military hardware that will almost certainly not protect us anyway.
In the literal meaning of "terrorist"--people who create terror for power--governments and the media are way ahead of any third rate coward in some cave halfway around the world. Hold the people who spread fear accountable the next time you go to the ballot box.
I own a Ti PowerBook and have used iBooks. I think the polycarbonate on the iBook is actually more rugged than the thin titanium casing on the PowerBook.
I agree (but I find it pretty ironic that your posting uses fixed line breaks).
Themes are usually tied to the screen size,
using pixmaps for buttons and such.
Many theme engines usually allow both vector-based and pixmap-based components. It's up to individual theme writers to decide what to use. If you get a theme that doesn't scale and scaling matters to you, don't use the theme.
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There are four kinds of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, trade secrets, and trademarks. The only IP that could apply here is trademarks. As far as trademarks go, if we consider Cage's name a trademark, the attribution of the piece to Cage is entirely accurate. If Batt had copied any of Cage's other pieces, he could also have properly used Cage's name to identify it, but he would have run afoul of copyright. In this case, he is properly using Cage's name to identify the piece, but since there is no content, he isn't running afoul of copyright law either.
However, it's a sad comment on the state of the arts in America that such a simple, whimsical attribution becomes subject to a legal dispute.
Other than that, the technique sounds unnecessarily laborious and complex. There are easier ways to melt metal, even at home. Thermite, for example, should appeal to people who like fireworks. Basic textbooks on inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, and metallurgy can tell you how. (Don't people learn this stuff in high school chemistry anymore?)
That's absurd. You don't infringe someone's copyright or misrepresent them by acknowledging their prior contributions. You infringe someone's copyright by, well, copying their work. Now, leaving a minute of silence is a neat artistic idea, but ideas aren't copyrightable, only expressions of those ideas. And there is simply nothing about a minute of silence as an expression of an idea that is unique--there were plenty of silences everywhere before Cage.
Putting nuclear weapons into space is beneficial to saber rattling US politicians in the short term--that's why they will do it. It isn't beneficial to Americans or the world in the long term. As usual, US politicians take a short-term, politically expedient view. Morality, long-term benefits, and the rest of the world usually don't seem to factor into their considerations.
Many people would consider an open source product if they knew about it. The problem with acceptance of open source software in many businesses has to do with lack of a marketing budget for open source software projects, not with lack of either quality or acceptance.
Given our current record on international treaties, our government will probably declare those null and void when it suits them. I suspect it's going to start with US-deployed space-based lasers and space-based nuclear power for weapons systems, then dual-use nuclear technology ("it's a nuclear rocket, but it makes a mighty fine dirty bomb, too"), and eventually all pretenses are going to fall. And the US is going to do whatever it likes on the moon, if we ever find the money to send more missions there.
Did the government of Honduras as the US to do this for them? Is the government of Honduras paying for law enforcement work and legal costs? If not, why are we wasting our money on this? Don't our police and legal system have more important things to worry about than whether the Honduran government gets back an expensive paperweight?
I'll give you this much, though: I think the government should not spend its money on chasing down Honduran paperweights. They gave it away as a gift--who cares where it ends up?
Sure: I have taken 15h trips across many countries.
In an attempt to save money, I looked to see how much it would cost to take the train to Denver, from the middle of Illinois. Not only did it cost the same, but the train trip would take TWO DAYS.
Current train service in the US sucks. That's because the US government isn't investing enough money in it.
It's about 3000 miles from San Francisco to New York. A current generation high-speed train could easily traverse that in 15h, with time for stops in between. We can probably get that down to under 10h eventually.
Amtrack is loosing money, the airlines are making money. You say that the only reason is because they aren't properly accounting for it's enviromental costs?
That's not quite what I said. But since you bring it up, I suspect both Amtrak and air travel would probably be commercially money losing commercial ventures if all costs were accounted for. The question is which of the two modes of transportation should our government favor.
What are the enviromental costs for a train?
They are considerably lower per passenger mile. That's one of the attractions of rail travel.
Also, don't forget that time is money too. Add in those costs to your calculations.
Time spent on a modern train is productive: an uninterrupted, comfortable stretch of time from the time you get on until the time you get to your destination. Once there, you'll generally feel rested and productive. Time spent on air travel is mostly unproductive: waiting in lines, running around, waiting for luggage, being squeezed into tiny seats. Even flying first class doesn't alleviate many of those problems.
It is true, of course, that if we see, say, 1 visit per year (the same spacecraft flying around the planet a few times, resulting in many sightings), there must have been 1 million visits over the last million years, but so what? A million years is a long time.
Of course, more likely, aliens pick planets to visit based on whether they might harbor interesting life forms, which means that the frequency of visits probably has increased greatly over the last hundreds of millions of years.
Yes, and the whole point of the article was wrong. If aliens visit at random, they are a Poisson process, and the number of visits you see depends only on length you observe. Civilization, using electricity, etc., enhances the probability of visits over the past 55 years.
Furthermore, the G4 is not really a 64 bit processor. The biggest difference between 32 bit and true 64 bit processors is that 64 bit processors use 64 bit pointers.
Apple puts out some nice hardware and software, but they are rarely the first with anything and they don't really do much research anymore either.
The age of the earth doesn't matter for this kind of calculation. What matters is the propensity for space travel of aliens, the duration of trips, the prevalence of earth-like planets, the expected lifetime of spacefaring civilizations, and the ability of aliens to detect earth-like planets.
That may be "quick" from some points of view, but if it takes 1.4 million years for our forests to regrow, we are in trouble...
What "old version"? There are (almost) no behemoths like that flying right now. Building them creates a new level of risk. And flying each passenger 30% more efficiently than right now still makes matters worse overall if twice as many people end up flying.
Yeah, nothing like a 15 hour cross country trip [in a train] to calm your nerves.
I'd much rather spend 15 hours in a train than 6 hours in an airplane, something that usually turns into 10-12 hours anyway with all the waiting, delays, security, and traffic jams.
And those underwater trains that we can take to Europe sure are fun.
We have plenty of flights to Europe right now. There is no logical reason why we need to make overseas travel ever cheaper. In fact, the only reason why air travel is a cheap as it is is because we aren't properly accounting for its environmental costs.
The plane doesn't use less fuel than current planes, it uses less fuel than a similarly oversized and ridiculous AirBus.
If we need that kind of volume in airplanes, then passenger miles have come to the point where high speed trains make sense: on most routes, they are more economical, more comfortable, and more environmentally friendly.
No, they don't, because he doesn't even tell us what distribution is running. If I install Gnome2 when it becomes part of the standard RedHat or Debian install, this problem will almost certainly not be present.
Should he not have mentioned a serious problem he encountered in his review?
He should do a review competently. That includes starting out with a clear statement of what he was testing and how he was testing it.
Here's a newsflash for you: Gnome2 is the radio, not the car. We know the radio works because we can hook it up to power and it plays music. If you get the radio with your new car and the radio doesn't work, it was installed incorrectly. Sensible people complain to their car dealer about that.
But from a user's perspective, Gnome is Gnome.
There is nothing in the world Gnome developers can do if the Linux distributors screw up the installation. Sensible people complain to the people with the power to fix a problem; venting to some hapless bystander is pointless and aggravating.
And a more perfect example of the kind of geek-superiority
Actually, you just gave us another example of populist cluelessness.
UI designers laugh at lots of things, most of them completely irrelevant. In this case, the author is complaining about some baroque scheme for the theming UI. But theming is optional--you don't need it. People play around with themes when they are bored; it might even be bad if the theme configuration UI is too slick.
Gnome 2 does not come without its problems. I do not have sounds on my Gnome 2. I think that Gnome 2 assumes that you have Gnome 1.4 installed,
That's an issue with packaging, not Gnome2 itself. The same goes for many of the other grips that the author has.
The new version removes the flexibility found on Gnome 1.x and it does not introduce anything really new or spectacularly interesting in its UI design.
If the translation of this is "it has fewer options to confuse users and it didn't change its look or feel significantly so that people don't need retraining", then that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
Overall, I didn't see a single substantive or informed criticism in the article. There probably are plenty of things wrong with Gnome2, but we'll have to wait for a more careful write-up of those.
Also, you can't expect too much from any desktop that follows current paradigms. Windows and MacOS have plenty of warts and problems, too. Overall, in my experience, Gnome and KDE are no worse.
You can: fabrics made from natural fibers, wooden containers, unbleached paper, etc. Cellophane and rayon are made from cellulose and biodegrade. Glass also makes great containers and is environmentally friendly when reused. There are many environmentally friendly natural paints and coatings, often based on milk, minerals, linseed oil, etc. A lot of older plastics also are based to some degree on natural substances: casein formaldehyde (from milk or soybeans), celluloid, cellulose acetate, natural rubber, gum lac, etc. Some of those are probably fairly bio-degradable, but that probably also means that they wear faster.
I don't think we need more materials. What we need is the will to use them. And what we also need is standardization and reuse of containers in general.
That's true. But from the brief description in the article, it sounds like this stuff really is pretty environmentally friendly. Among other things, it seems to be composed only of carbohydrates.
And if you're going shopping, try the bulk section and bring your own REUSABLE cloth bags.
People won't do that without financial incentives. Perhaps recycling taxes on plastic bags and higher landfill costs could incentivize people; the proceeds could be used for public eduation campaigns.
Why do they do that? Certainly not to improve our life expectancy or security. If we wanted to do that, spending $280 billion on public health and education would save a lot more lives than a missile defense system even in the unlikely event that we were attacked and that the system worked. If we are worried about attacks on our financial system, stopping crooks like Enron and WorldCom executives would be a whole lot less trouble and costly, not to mention less threatening to our civil liberties; Osama sending a Microsoft Word virus out of his cave pales in comparison to what a single felonious US executive can achieve.
No, people create fear in order to gain power. That's true for Afghan terrorists as much as for the US government and the media. Creating fear gives people power and it allows politicians to move billions of dollars to their favorite campaign contributors.
Folks, life is dangerous: live with it. And learn to evaluate risks and spend dollars wisely on prevention. Nearly 50000 people die each year in the US in traffic accidents, more Americans than in the entire Vietnam War. Cars cause even more deaths each year from pollution. Smoking causes 440000 premature deaths each year. Obesity causes about 280000 premature deaths each year. (Data comes mostly from JAMA.) Those are all easily preventable, with better education, reduced stress, and a better transportation infrastructure. Instead, however, we get worked up about obscure threats and spend enormous amounts of money on anti-terrorist measures and military hardware that will almost certainly not protect us anyway.
In the literal meaning of "terrorist"--people who create terror for power--governments and the media are way ahead of any third rate coward in some cave halfway around the world. Hold the people who spread fear accountable the next time you go to the ballot box.
I own a Ti PowerBook and have used iBooks. I think the polycarbonate on the iBook is actually more rugged than the thin titanium casing on the PowerBook.
I agree (but I find it pretty ironic that your posting uses fixed line breaks).
Themes are usually tied to the screen size, using pixmaps for buttons and such.
Many theme engines usually allow both vector-based and pixmap-based components. It's up to individual theme writers to decide what to use. If you get a theme that doesn't scale and scaling matters to you, don't use the theme.