The person on the TV said that it was bad that teacher A got a good raise because their kids passed the NCLB test, while teacher B got a crappy raise when their kids failed the test. I say that's a GOOD thing. Get the crappy teachers out of the system, or make them shape up and do their job right.
So which ever teacher happens to have the smartest kids in their class gets the money? Too bad if you've got some slow learners in your class - you're not going to hit the marks your colleague with a couple of budding geniuses will, so say goodbye to your raise.
I agree teachers should be evaluated, and their renumeration based on their ability, but you cannot judge that solely on the basis of how their class performs on a test, because those results are not determined solely by the teacher's ability. Their determined by a combination of the teacher's ability, and their student's ability - as well as a myriad other smaller factors.
DISCLAIMER: Both parents are both teachers, but in Australia, not the US.
How is this a bad thing? Sounds like any other contractual agreement to me. If you don't want to implement the policies, then don't accept the aid. It's not as if the nations who're offering aid are obligated to do so just out of the goodness of their hearts.
Fine, then call it what it is. Say that your buying out foreign governments. Say that you're exploiting the desperation of impoverished countries to help yourself get richer. Don't package it all up as good samaritan "foreign aid".
Err...right. Because no other culture in history before the US ever thought the world was created through supernatural means rather than through physics.
That's because after a certain age, you know you're not going to have many options out there. Why do you think women start going nuts about racing to find the right guy by a certain age? Because they know that their expiration date is approaching. You're not going to find the same dream guy at 35 or 40 that you could have gotten when you were 20 or 25. And unless you're Roy Firestone, you're not going to have the wealth to attract a hot young girl when you're in your 60s.
Plus, after a certain age, your weiner doesn't function so well anyway and you just want someone who will clean up when you miss the toilet and steer you away from crashing forehead-first into pillars while mall-walking.
Now you're contradicting your original post. At first you said the only thing that matters in a relationship was beauty, charisma, power and money. Now you're saying that as people get older, they stop caring about beauty and money and care more about security, loyalty, etc.
As for common-interests.. I don't think so.
If I want someont to go bowling or fishing with, I've got buddies. If you want someone to go shoe-shopping with and watch Orlando Bloom releases with, you've got your girlfriends.
I didn't say you had to go fishing with your girlfriend. I said that you had to have some type of common interest - if you and your SO have nothing in common but the bed, either you're going to spend a helluva lot of time screwing, or you're going to be incredibly bored in their company. Either way, it probably won't end well for the relationship.
I agree with you that the intense "in love" feeling is fleeting, and that a lot of harm is probably caused by people trying to futiley recapture that. But there are other ways to experience love apart from an intense desire to have sex with someone. My point wasn't that being "in love" is necessary for a relationship, but rather that beauty, wealth, charisma and power aren't the only (or even primary) things that keep relationships going.
They said "personalities mesh" not "personalities are the same". You'd expect meshing personalities to complement each other, not be identical. A "meshing" personality for a person with "general arrogance and a belief of personal entitlement" is probably going to be a humble person who gives freely.
Beauty, charisma, money and power might help create an initial attraction or interest (I say might - and there are other things that do as well) but they sure as hell don't keep people together.
People grow old, get wrinkly, saggy and less attractive. However, it seems old couples don't divorce each other as soon as they start spotting grey hair in their spouse. There are couples (and families) who have persevered through poverty, and most people don't have any real personal power to speak of.
Whatever first interests you in a person becomes irrelevant when you're trying to form a relationship with them that lasts longer than one night. If you are attracted to someone, but later find out your are not compatible (radically different political views, absolutely no common interests, personality clashes, etc) those factors will overcome things like beauty, money and charisma and the relationship will end. Even if you are relatively compatible, I personally don't think it's compatibility so much as hard work and dedication that keeps relationships together. You need to be attracted to someone to initiate a relationship with them. You need to be compatible with them for that relationship to develop. And you have to be willing to make sacrifices and compromises for that relationship to persevere.
And beauty, money and power aren't the only factors in kicking off a relationship. Common interests would be another big one I'd say. Not to mention, as single people get older and more mature(or desperate, depending on your perspective) they're willing to forgo stuff like jaw-dropping beauty and stacks of cash if it means forming a good relationship.
Both me and my brother collect DVDs. Including box sets, we would have over 300 DVDs, all together. Most of the stuff I'm interested in, I already have on DVD. I'd assume that their probably would not be a greater variety available from iTMS, and that their prices would probably be comparable to DVD (unlike music, you can't really split DVDs into parts and sell them cheaply by the track).
I know at least a few people who have very large DVD collections, and I assume there are lots of others out there. With iPods, ripping music was painless and reasonably quick. But if you're expecting people to shift to a new format so soon after DVD came out, just so they can play it on their iPod...I wouldn't expect that to really take off.
One problem is that engineers building bridges have a much better idea of the parameters they're working in. Commodity software has no such luxury. People's machines vary. There's no way you can test how your product interacts with any combination of the millions of other programs out there. Or how it works with it's target operating system, with every combination of the hundred or so patches and service kits that may or may not be installed on the user's system.Not to mention every combination of hardware devices.
Also, despite traditional engineering's complexity, many of its artifacts have very simple functions to fulfill. A bridge, however comples, basically needs to be able to bear the load across it. To test it, you can pile on more and more load and see how well it holds up. The writer for a particular piece of software has no idea how the end user is going to end up using it. Modern software (and things like electronic systems) are much more interactive than other engineered products. Even very complex systems like cars generally have less interactivity than your average computer program. The user inputs into the system are very few - steering, braking, accelerating, gear shifting, filling up the tank.
If you were to go to an engineer and ask him to build a bridge but couldn't tell him how long it should be, nor how much traffic it would take, nor the average weight of the traffic, nor the environmental conditions it would be in, nor it's height above the surrounding terrain - that would be a situation more closely paralleled to modern software development.
There was a sort-of-leopardlike predator called a marsupial lion (aka thylacoleo, the first "o" is kind of silent).
But there weren't real cats, in the sense of members of the cat family. A thylacoleo or thylacine is more closely related to a koala, and a real cat is more closely related to a human, than the either is to the other.
That first paragraph was a quotation from the great-grand parent. I was responding to it, not endorsing it. I know Thylacines were not cats.
Some people do indeed argue the aborigines didn't play a large part in wiping out the diprotodon, megalania, thylacoleo, mainland thylacine, etc., etc.. Their arguments never made any sense to me, but YMMV.
The Diprotodon, Thylacoleo and the Magalania are all very large pleistocene critters. A great many megafaune species became extince during that period due to a rather noticable cold spell. There is evidence that the Diprotodon, at least, co-existed with homo sapient, but not much that they contributed in any major way to it's extinction.
I'm not doubting that a few species became extinct due to the aboriginals (although I couldn't name any offhand). What I'm saying is the mass extinction that occurred when Europeans arrived was not because of humans suddenly arriving on the scene, it was due to the large, sudden, and drastic changes a certain group of humans made to the local biosphere.
But seeing as about 2/3rds of all native australian fauna have been wiped out since the arrival of the environmental disaster known as homo sapiens, it's certainly possible that there were some cats in there somewhere.
Well, actually, it's only since the arrival of Europeans. There were homo sapiens living in Australia for quite a while before this. And, to be fair, the majority of extinctions since European settlement came about through ignorance, carelessness or accidents in introducing foreign species. Examples like the thylacine, which was actively hunted into extinction, are the exception rather than the rule.
Okay, right from the start, the headline is an editorial via the use of the term "victim."
Victim does not imply innocence. If the RIAA sued her, then she is their victim, regardless of whether the RIAA's suit was valid or not.
from the racketeer-influenced-and-corrupt-organizations dept.
The RIAA was convicted of price-fixing. Racketeering and corruption are fairly valid adjectives in that context.
This is the kicker. "Average organized crime syndicate" is so blatantly over the top that the obvious intent is to stir the hornet's next of pro-piracy advocates on Slashdot (which has become P2P piracy central in the past couple of years) to generate page hits.
RICO was originally set up to attack organized crime. That's where the parallel to organized crime comes in. Not that the RIAA is putting out hits and charging protection money, but that the laws set up to catch organized crime is catching them too.
The RIAA did what it is legally entitled to do; go after infringers of its copyright that it found on the P2P networks.
Except that it has a history of getting the wrong people with it's scatter-shot lawsuits. If this person turns out to be one of those people, then no, the RIAA is not doing what it is legally entitled to.
No, slashdot isn't POV neutral, but when was the last time you saw a neutral mainstream news report? At least their editorializing is in some sense justifiable.
Nonsense. You can get a nice 17.5" laptop with a full-size keyboard (numeric keypad and all), non-glare screen and desktop class CPU from a variety of manufacturers and OEMs - but expect it to cost a lot, weigh a lot and run out of battery quickly.
Either way, not hugely wonderful for productivity out in the sun away from power outlets.
While I appreciate the sentiment, and I do enjoy spending time sitting outside in the sun, I can't think of worse setup for good, productive work.
Laptop keyboards are too small. Laptop screens are too small. The glare from the sun makes reading the screen difficult. Finding a good, comfortable, ergonomic place to sit for hours at a time outisde in the sun is going to be pretty difficult. All the stuff going on around you is going to be a distraction. Just for starters.
A laptop and sunshine might be good for enjoyment (although personally I'd take a bunch of friends and sunshine) but not for productivity.
I agree with your post, but I just wanted to take this off on a tangent.
What did you think of FF8? I loved the story and the characters - I thought it was a breath of fresh air for the FF series to have a game that more or less revolved around the romance. But I absolutely *loathed* the GF/Junction system.
I could get most characters their best/second-best weapon before the end of Disc 1. Refining Tents into Curaga, you could get insane amounts of hit points early on. And because all your stats were linked to your spells, it was a *disadavantage* to cast spells from your stock, and I very rarely did.
So, was just wondering what your opinion was, as someone else who played 8 all the way through.
Even if it is a freak accident, if you believe a complex system can exist for even a few hundred millions of years without one freak accident, then you're obviously not an engineer
Except it doesn't require just any freak accident, it would require one very specific type of freak accident to generate life. In fact, since we still don't know exactly how life is generated we really can't say what is required for it to come about.
So in order for something to be "literature" it has to obtuse and inaccessible? This is the posturing sort of attitude that had me laughing all through my university writing course.
I agree about those tags down the bottom of the email, but I expect a large law firm probably has policies that their employees are expected to follow that would apply to his situation.
They probably say that email is not to be used for non-work related purposes (Every place Ive worked at has had that one) but as a law firm, I'd imagine they'd need a strict policy about internal correspondance leaving the firms internal network.
Whoever sent the email to someone outside the office is probably going to get reamed.
Or how about this: we already press citizens into jury duty yes? Why not press them into reviewing patent applications? It could be like scientific journal peer review.
Problems
You would need to have people trained in the field. People untrained in the field deciding on patents is what we have now.
Nobody in a field wants their competitors to have patents. Why would anybody vote to let their competition have a 14-year monopoly?
Volume. How many engineering patents are applied for a day? How long does patent processing take? And how many should form the panel? So how many qualified engineers would need to be removed from the workforce on a daily basis to process these applications? How would companies feel when the engineer they're paying $70k a year for is spending 2/3 of his time down at the patent office giving their oponents patents?
While I think the USPTO definately needs more qualified personel, I don't think drafting them from industry (that will have its own agenda to push in the proceedings) is at all a good idea.
One problem with a MMORTS game would be the fact that players control multiple units. With, say, Starcraft, players were restricted to 200 food units (although, if you played Protoss and mind controlled a builder of another race you could get up to 600). And an 8 player game where everyone had maxed out their units started to lag terribly. Just trying to imagine a game server with 1000 people all controlling 100+ units makes my modem cry.
Also, what happens when a player logs off? In MMORPGs, it doesn't really matter because their character can just vanish. In a MMORTS, you don't control a character, you control a whole swathe of geography. Does your part of the world vanish when you drop off?
Then there's the problem that the game can actually be one. In WoW, you can never really win the game, because even if you defeat every single Horde player, they just respawn and start again. In an RTS game, when you destroy a unit, the unit is, well, destroyed. This would mean that eventually one player would amass a huge army, and would be able to just roll over any new players. That's generally what happens in finite-time RTSes anyway. Either that or a number of players build up large armies and theres a apocalyptic final battle. Either way, the game is over.
These are just some problems Ive thought up. Would be cool if someone could solve them though.
These scenarios are addressing a different issue than most of the rest of discussion about copyright. In these scenarios, somebody is claiming the original author's (inventor, composer, etc) work as their own. The debate about the public domain is essentially about free distribution, and the right to build on prior work. Even though Gilbert and Sullivan's musicals are now in the Public Domain, Gilbert and Sullivan are still credited as the original composers.
In none of these scenarios would having a long copyright (or patent term) help those who have been ripped off. Gilbert and Sullivan already had copyright of the song that was ripped off - making their copyright last a hundred years wouldn't have helped them. The last two examples, extending the terms of patents would have actually made the inventors worse off, as the companies who cheated them would have exclusive access to their inventions for longer.
The issue for a creator is theft of the idea. It is reasonable that copyright and patent law work to make creators able to benefit from their work, then they can afford to create.
Lessig isn't arguing against the existence of copyright necessarily. He's saying that the current practice of continually extending it defeats the basic purpose of a copyright law.
What they did was taking advantage of computer that they DID NOT OWN to do something thay were not supposed to do.
There's still a matter of degree - what they did is in no way equivelant to rape. I'm not arguing there should be no consequences, I'm arguing the consequences should not be a third-degree felony charge.
Reading your awnser Id say that you agree that i could break in the Highway department servers and use the security cameras to do whatever i wanted to do with them, because I paid for them with my tax money.
No, Im saying if they Highway Department ordered you not to drive on the road unless you installed a spy camera in your car, I would have no problem with you disabling the spy camera.
The problem here is drawing the line between what is forgivable and what is not. There are people Educated in those matters, Laws are here to be followed and not to be broken as moder society tends to put it. You could argue that courts are unfair and that people who pass out sentences are not qualified to do so and so on
In this instance, I have no problem with the courts. This would have been laughed out of a court, which I'm sure is why it's trying to be settles so leniantly. What I have a problem with is an authority (the school administration) falling back on an abuse of the legal system because they do not have the intelligence, common sense, or humility to deal with the situation appropriatly.
some studedents of a public school gained access to final exams, some said the exams were not guarded securely enough , well taking into account the results security should have been better, but in the end of the story the kids were at the most taken into other schools, they did not flunk
So, would you have been happier had those students been charged with a felony, put away in jail for three or four years and have a felony conviction follow them around for the rest of their life? I'm not saying there should be no consequences, I'm saying this is petty stuff, and nothing close to theft or breaking and entering, and on a completely different scale to rape.
Because it's a damn sight easier to drop in supplies than bus out people? How exactly are they supposed to get people out? By helicopter? By busses driving through flooded streets? By small boats puttering around the flooded streets? Not to mention that the current unrest makes any of these up-close solutions hazardous. How many people can you evactuate in an hour in that situation? Contrast this to how many people could be serviced by air-dropped supplies in an hour.
The first priority is to make sure people are in no immediate danger, such as starvation or dehydration. The air drops service this. Once the immediate danger is somewhat satisfied, then you can focus on the harder, longer and more arduous task of evacuation.
Slashdot Mirror
The person on the TV said that it was bad that teacher A got a good raise because their kids passed the NCLB test, while teacher B got a crappy raise when their kids failed the test. I say that's a GOOD thing. Get the crappy teachers out of the system, or make them shape up and do their job right.
So which ever teacher happens to have the smartest kids in their class gets the money? Too bad if you've got some slow learners in your class - you're not going to hit the marks your colleague with a couple of budding geniuses will, so say goodbye to your raise.
I agree teachers should be evaluated, and their renumeration based on their ability, but you cannot judge that solely on the basis of how their class performs on a test, because those results are not determined solely by the teacher's ability. Their determined by a combination of the teacher's ability, and their student's ability - as well as a myriad other smaller factors.
DISCLAIMER: Both parents are both teachers, but in Australia, not the US.
How is this a bad thing? Sounds like any other contractual agreement to me. If you don't want to implement the policies, then don't accept the aid. It's not as if the nations who're offering aid are obligated to do so just out of the goodness of their hearts.
Fine, then call it what it is. Say that your buying out foreign governments. Say that you're exploiting the desperation of impoverished countries to help yourself get richer. Don't package it all up as good samaritan "foreign aid".
This is the country that gave us creationists.
Err...right. Because no other culture in history before the US ever thought the world was created through supernatural means rather than through physics.
That's because after a certain age, you know you're not going to have many options out there. Why do you think women start going nuts about racing to find the right guy by a certain age? Because they know that their expiration date is approaching. You're not going to find the same dream guy at 35 or 40 that you could have gotten when you were 20 or 25. And unless you're Roy Firestone, you're not going to have the wealth to attract a hot young girl when you're in your 60s.
Plus, after a certain age, your weiner doesn't function so well anyway and you just want someone who will clean up when you miss the toilet and steer you away from crashing forehead-first into pillars while mall-walking.
Now you're contradicting your original post. At first you said the only thing that matters in a relationship was beauty, charisma, power and money. Now you're saying that as people get older, they stop caring about beauty and money and care more about security, loyalty, etc.
As for common-interests.. I don't think so.
If I want someont to go bowling or fishing with, I've got buddies. If you want someone to go shoe-shopping with and watch Orlando Bloom releases with, you've got your girlfriends.
I didn't say you had to go fishing with your girlfriend. I said that you had to have some type of common interest - if you and your SO have nothing in common but the bed, either you're going to spend a helluva lot of time screwing, or you're going to be incredibly bored in their company. Either way, it probably won't end well for the relationship.
I agree with you that the intense "in love" feeling is fleeting, and that a lot of harm is probably caused by people trying to futiley recapture that. But there are other ways to experience love apart from an intense desire to have sex with someone. My point wasn't that being "in love" is necessary for a relationship, but rather that beauty, wealth, charisma and power aren't the only (or even primary) things that keep relationships going.
They said "personalities mesh" not "personalities are the same". You'd expect meshing personalities to complement each other, not be identical. A "meshing" personality for a person with "general arrogance and a belief of personal entitlement" is probably going to be a humble person who gives freely.
Beauty, charisma, money and power might help create an initial attraction or interest (I say might - and there are other things that do as well) but they sure as hell don't keep people together.
People grow old, get wrinkly, saggy and less attractive. However, it seems old couples don't divorce each other as soon as they start spotting grey hair in their spouse. There are couples (and families) who have persevered through poverty, and most people don't have any real personal power to speak of.
Whatever first interests you in a person becomes irrelevant when you're trying to form a relationship with them that lasts longer than one night. If you are attracted to someone, but later find out your are not compatible (radically different political views, absolutely no common interests, personality clashes, etc) those factors will overcome things like beauty, money and charisma and the relationship will end. Even if you are relatively compatible, I personally don't think it's compatibility so much as hard work and dedication that keeps relationships together. You need to be attracted to someone to initiate a relationship with them. You need to be compatible with them for that relationship to develop. And you have to be willing to make sacrifices and compromises for that relationship to persevere.
And beauty, money and power aren't the only factors in kicking off a relationship. Common interests would be another big one I'd say. Not to mention, as single people get older and more mature(or desperate, depending on your perspective) they're willing to forgo stuff like jaw-dropping beauty and stacks of cash if it means forming a good relationship.
Both me and my brother collect DVDs. Including box sets, we would have over 300 DVDs, all together. Most of the stuff I'm interested in, I already have on DVD. I'd assume that their probably would not be a greater variety available from iTMS, and that their prices would probably be comparable to DVD (unlike music, you can't really split DVDs into parts and sell them cheaply by the track). I know at least a few people who have very large DVD collections, and I assume there are lots of others out there. With iPods, ripping music was painless and reasonably quick. But if you're expecting people to shift to a new format so soon after DVD came out, just so they can play it on their iPod...I wouldn't expect that to really take off.
Forget decoding, how about encoding? How many people are going to sit there and wait while their computer spends half a day encoding a DVD into h.264?
One problem is that engineers building bridges have a much better idea of the parameters they're working in. Commodity software has no such luxury. People's machines vary. There's no way you can test how your product interacts with any combination of the millions of other programs out there. Or how it works with it's target operating system, with every combination of the hundred or so patches and service kits that may or may not be installed on the user's system.Not to mention every combination of hardware devices. Also, despite traditional engineering's complexity, many of its artifacts have very simple functions to fulfill. A bridge, however comples, basically needs to be able to bear the load across it. To test it, you can pile on more and more load and see how well it holds up. The writer for a particular piece of software has no idea how the end user is going to end up using it. Modern software (and things like electronic systems) are much more interactive than other engineered products. Even very complex systems like cars generally have less interactivity than your average computer program. The user inputs into the system are very few - steering, braking, accelerating, gear shifting, filling up the tank. If you were to go to an engineer and ask him to build a bridge but couldn't tell him how long it should be, nor how much traffic it would take, nor the average weight of the traffic, nor the environmental conditions it would be in, nor it's height above the surrounding terrain - that would be a situation more closely paralleled to modern software development.
There was a sort-of-leopardlike predator called a marsupial lion (aka thylacoleo, the first "o" is kind of silent). But there weren't real cats, in the sense of members of the cat family. A thylacoleo or thylacine is more closely related to a koala, and a real cat is more closely related to a human, than the either is to the other.
That first paragraph was a quotation from the great-grand parent. I was responding to it, not endorsing it. I know Thylacines were not cats.
Some people do indeed argue the aborigines didn't play a large part in wiping out the diprotodon, megalania, thylacoleo, mainland thylacine, etc., etc.. Their arguments never made any sense to me, but YMMV.
The Diprotodon, Thylacoleo and the Magalania are all very large pleistocene critters. A great many megafaune species became extince during that period due to a rather noticable cold spell. There is evidence that the Diprotodon, at least, co-existed with homo sapient, but not much that they contributed in any major way to it's extinction.
I'm not doubting that a few species became extinct due to the aboriginals (although I couldn't name any offhand). What I'm saying is the mass extinction that occurred when Europeans arrived was not because of humans suddenly arriving on the scene, it was due to the large, sudden, and drastic changes a certain group of humans made to the local biosphere.
But seeing as about 2/3rds of all native australian fauna have been wiped out since the arrival of the environmental disaster known as homo sapiens, it's certainly possible that there were some cats in there somewhere.
Well, actually, it's only since the arrival of Europeans. There were homo sapiens living in Australia for quite a while before this. And, to be fair, the majority of extinctions since European settlement came about through ignorance, carelessness or accidents in introducing foreign species. Examples like the thylacine, which was actively hunted into extinction, are the exception rather than the rule.
Okay, right from the start, the headline is an editorial via the use of the term "victim."
Victim does not imply innocence. If the RIAA sued her, then she is their victim, regardless of whether the RIAA's suit was valid or not.
from the racketeer-influenced-and-corrupt-organizations dept.
The RIAA was convicted of price-fixing. Racketeering and corruption are fairly valid adjectives in that context.
This is the kicker. "Average organized crime syndicate" is so blatantly over the top that the obvious intent is to stir the hornet's next of pro-piracy advocates on Slashdot (which has become P2P piracy central in the past couple of years) to generate page hits.
RICO was originally set up to attack organized crime. That's where the parallel to organized crime comes in. Not that the RIAA is putting out hits and charging protection money, but that the laws set up to catch organized crime is catching them too.
The RIAA did what it is legally entitled to do; go after infringers of its copyright that it found on the P2P networks.
Except that it has a history of getting the wrong people with it's scatter-shot lawsuits. If this person turns out to be one of those people, then no, the RIAA is not doing what it is legally entitled to.
No, slashdot isn't POV neutral, but when was the last time you saw a neutral mainstream news report? At least their editorializing is in some sense justifiable.
No, but the great-grandparent forgot to add a consonant.
Nonsense. You can get a nice 17.5" laptop with a full-size keyboard (numeric keypad and all), non-glare screen and desktop class CPU from a variety of manufacturers and OEMs - but expect it to cost a lot, weigh a lot and run out of battery quickly.
Either way, not hugely wonderful for productivity out in the sun away from power outlets.
While I appreciate the sentiment, and I do enjoy spending time sitting outside in the sun, I can't think of worse setup for good, productive work.
Laptop keyboards are too small. Laptop screens are too small. The glare from the sun makes reading the screen difficult. Finding a good, comfortable, ergonomic place to sit for hours at a time outisde in the sun is going to be pretty difficult. All the stuff going on around you is going to be a distraction. Just for starters.
A laptop and sunshine might be good for enjoyment (although personally I'd take a bunch of friends and sunshine) but not for productivity.
I agree with your post, but I just wanted to take this off on a tangent.
What did you think of FF8? I loved the story and the characters - I thought it was a breath of fresh air for the FF series to have a game that more or less revolved around the romance. But I absolutely *loathed* the GF/Junction system.
I could get most characters their best/second-best weapon before the end of Disc 1. Refining Tents into Curaga, you could get insane amounts of hit points early on. And because all your stats were linked to your spells, it was a *disadavantage* to cast spells from your stock, and I very rarely did.
So, was just wondering what your opinion was, as someone else who played 8 all the way through.
Even if it is a freak accident, if you believe a complex system can exist for even a few hundred millions of years without one freak accident, then you're obviously not an engineer
Except it doesn't require just any freak accident, it would require one very specific type of freak accident to generate life. In fact, since we still don't know exactly how life is generated we really can't say what is required for it to come about.
So in order for something to be "literature" it has to obtuse and inaccessible? This is the posturing sort of attitude that had me laughing all through my university writing course.
I agree about those tags down the bottom of the email, but I expect a large law firm probably has policies that their employees are expected to follow that would apply to his situation.
They probably say that email is not to be used for non-work related purposes (Every place Ive worked at has had that one) but as a law firm, I'd imagine they'd need a strict policy about internal correspondance leaving the firms internal network.
Whoever sent the email to someone outside the office is probably going to get reamed.
Problems
- You would need to have people trained in the field. People untrained in the field deciding on patents is what we have now.
- Nobody in a field wants their competitors to have patents. Why would anybody vote to let their competition have a 14-year monopoly?
- Volume. How many engineering patents are applied for a day? How long does patent processing take? And how many should form the panel? So how many qualified engineers would need to be removed from the workforce on a daily basis to process these applications? How would companies feel when the engineer they're paying $70k a year for is spending 2/3 of his time down at the patent office giving their oponents patents?
While I think the USPTO definately needs more qualified personel, I don't think drafting them from industry (that will have its own agenda to push in the proceedings) is at all a good idea.One problem with a MMORTS game would be the fact that players control multiple units. With, say, Starcraft, players were restricted to 200 food units (although, if you played Protoss and mind controlled a builder of another race you could get up to 600). And an 8 player game where everyone had maxed out their units started to lag terribly. Just trying to imagine a game server with 1000 people all controlling 100+ units makes my modem cry.
Also, what happens when a player logs off? In MMORPGs, it doesn't really matter because their character can just vanish. In a MMORTS, you don't control a character, you control a whole swathe of geography. Does your part of the world vanish when you drop off?
Then there's the problem that the game can actually be one. In WoW, you can never really win the game, because even if you defeat every single Horde player, they just respawn and start again. In an RTS game, when you destroy a unit, the unit is, well, destroyed. This would mean that eventually one player would amass a huge army, and would be able to just roll over any new players. That's generally what happens in finite-time RTSes anyway. Either that or a number of players build up large armies and theres a apocalyptic final battle. Either way, the game is over.
These are just some problems Ive thought up. Would be cool if someone could solve them though.
These scenarios are addressing a different issue than most of the rest of discussion about copyright. In these scenarios, somebody is claiming the original author's (inventor, composer, etc) work as their own. The debate about the public domain is essentially about free distribution, and the right to build on prior work. Even though Gilbert and Sullivan's musicals are now in the Public Domain, Gilbert and Sullivan are still credited as the original composers.
In none of these scenarios would having a long copyright (or patent term) help those who have been ripped off. Gilbert and Sullivan already had copyright of the song that was ripped off - making their copyright last a hundred years wouldn't have helped them. The last two examples, extending the terms of patents would have actually made the inventors worse off, as the companies who cheated them would have exclusive access to their inventions for longer.
The issue for a creator is theft of the idea. It is reasonable that copyright and patent law work to make creators able to benefit from their work, then they can afford to create.
Lessig isn't arguing against the existence of copyright necessarily. He's saying that the current practice of continually extending it defeats the basic purpose of a copyright law.
Well all of them are illegal !
What they did was taking advantage of computer that they DID NOT OWN to do something thay were not supposed to do.
There's still a matter of degree - what they did is in no way equivelant to rape. I'm not arguing there should be no consequences, I'm arguing the consequences should not be a third-degree felony charge.
Reading your awnser Id say that you agree that i could break in the Highway department servers and use the security cameras to do whatever i wanted to do with them, because I paid for them with my tax money.
No, Im saying if they Highway Department ordered you not to drive on the road unless you installed a spy camera in your car, I would have no problem with you disabling the spy camera.
The problem here is drawing the line between what is forgivable and what is not. There are people Educated in those matters, Laws are here to be followed and not to be broken as moder society tends to put it. You could argue that courts are unfair and that people who pass out sentences are not qualified to do so and so on
In this instance, I have no problem with the courts. This would have been laughed out of a court, which I'm sure is why it's trying to be settles so leniantly. What I have a problem with is an authority (the school administration) falling back on an abuse of the legal system because they do not have the intelligence, common sense, or humility to deal with the situation appropriatly.
some studedents of a public school gained access to final exams, some said the exams were not guarded securely enough , well taking into account the results security should have been better, but in the end of the story the kids were at the most taken into other schools, they did not flunk
So, would you have been happier had those students been charged with a felony, put away in jail for three or four years and have a felony conviction follow them around for the rest of their life? I'm not saying there should be no consequences, I'm saying this is petty stuff, and nothing close to theft or breaking and entering, and on a completely different scale to rape.
Because it's a damn sight easier to drop in supplies than bus out people? How exactly are they supposed to get people out? By helicopter? By busses driving through flooded streets? By small boats puttering around the flooded streets? Not to mention that the current unrest makes any of these up-close solutions hazardous. How many people can you evactuate in an hour in that situation? Contrast this to how many people could be serviced by air-dropped supplies in an hour.
The first priority is to make sure people are in no immediate danger, such as starvation or dehydration. The air drops service this. Once the immediate danger is somewhat satisfied, then you can focus on the harder, longer and more arduous task of evacuation.