If a policeman, acting as an agent of the government, had come in and insisted you not publish an article on sex, that would be a free press issue.
In a public school, the principal is a government employee and an agent of the government. If he/she blocks content, then that is government-sponsered censorship. Here in California, we have an explicit law against such censorship of public school papers. Sadly, it's rarely enforced.
60 Minutes had a piece several weeks ago about the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. They provide lots of private funding for medical research. And one of the projects they mentioned was the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines for research.
The dictionary tells us that you have to remove something in order to steal it.
Actually, the online Mirriam-Webster dictionary says I can "steal a kiss" or "steal one's thunder". Neither of which deprives a victim of property. Tyrants can "steal our liberty" leaving us without something we had, but is liberty property?
M-W also lists "identity theft" (which does not leave anyone without an identity nor is an identity property). You can argue that copyrights shouldn't be treated as property, but, with our current laws and precedents, they are.
While it's true that--in legal terms--copyright infringement is not theft, I think the people who harp on this informal use of the language are off on a tangent. As attorney general, Ashcroft should have been more careful in his choice of words, but in general I see no harm in people referring to copyright infringement as theft or piracy
"Steal" has a long history of usage with abstractions that can't be taken in the sense you're trying to limit theft to. Consider:
If you are on the Internet without a hardware router/firewall... I really don't feel sorry for you.
Can you recommend a hardware firewall that works with dial-up? Do you know of a virus checker whose updates are small enough to be downloaded a few minutes at a time at 28.8 kbps*? While Windows updates are also trying to download?
* It's a 56 kbps modem, but it rarely connects at more than 28.8.
[I]t's a little absurd to expect privacy while you're on the road....
But the GPS unit still broadcasts information when it's off-road, on private property, in a private garage, outside the jurisdiction, etc. And how was the device planted? Under the hood or otherwise "inside" the vehicle?
Well, since you brought up the constitution... one thing it does say, is that copyright is to last *17* years. Currently, if my memory serves me right, copyright lasts for the lifetime of the author, plus 100 years.
Actually, in the enumeration of Congress's responsibilities, the US Consitution says:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries....
So it's completely up to Congress how long to extend protection, provided that there is some limit. I think the 17 years figure is the old duration of patents--not copyrights.
There are significant tax benefits to buying some SUVs and nearly all motor homes that make them appear financially feasible to buyers. Both are typically financed with a loan. SUVs and motor homes themselves can be used a collateral to secure the loans. You might have a hard time convincing a loan officer at a bank that your cloned cat is worth something close to the amount you would have to borrow.
Accessibility is a main selling point of the electronic voting machines that worry so many of us Slashdotters. They have screen readers, large fonts, high contrast, and support multiple languages. This is a good thing for those who need these features.
Of course, a system we could trust would be a good thing for everyone.
The rest of the world is in the process of implementing a similar accounting treatment of options. The US would have looked idiotic to have delayed this further.
And the US would never do anything that would make it look idiotic to the rest of the world.
It's one thing to be low-budget in production (the original Star Trek was about as low budget as Sci Fi comes)....
Star Trek was big budget television for its time.
A big difficulty in selling it to NBC was that they thought a sci-fi series would be too expensive.
Roddenbery and the others always wanted to tell even bigger stories than they had the funds for, which is why it sometimes seems so rough around the edges, but that's also why it was, from time to time, stunningly good.
Satellites need an accurate time source in order to maintain proper orbit and orientation. This used to mean building in an expensive atomic clock, not it means including a GPS receiver and using the GPS signal as the clock. I wonder, if GPS were selectively shut down over an area if that would impact other satellites.
This is the same ILM that launched the OpenEXR initiative, right ?
That digital image format which allows, among other, storage of data with a dynamic range that film can't even dream about capturing ?
Yes, one of the points of this talk (about two years ago) was the need for OpenEXR and how they hoped all the CGI tool providers would jump on board. But, at the time, they were still resorting to compression because they couldn't use a wide dynamic range all the way through the process. I don't know about the current status of OpenEXR.
There's absolutely no particular need to 'compress' contrast... CGI can be rendered within any range you like.
The point made by the speaker was that the CGI tool makers did not support wide dynamic range and that was why ILM was pushing OpenEXR. Not all of their tools are home-grown. They use a lot of off-the-shelf products (hardware and software) which are built for 24-bit color.
I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.
Also, according to the New York Times piece on this guy, this first prototype is a very large format negative film camera, and the image is scanned from the negative on a drum scanner.
Aside from that, I think people spend too much time worrying about resolution and not enough about bit depth. I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of magnitude. A B&W print is less. Color slides less, and color prints even less. But even a color print exceeds 24bpp (8 bits x RGB). Personally, I'd much rather look at projected slides than print.
I heard a talk by a visual effects guy from ILM who explained that when they have to composite live action from film with CGI (computer-generated imagery), the first thing they have to do is compress the contrast and color range to match the range of the CGI. If there are a lot of effects in the movie, they'll end up compressing the contrast for the entire film.
Another friend of mine who recently left ILM wouldn't tell me the actual resolution they use for visual effects (trade secret), but he implied it's much lower than you'd expect.
In a college recording studio I used, we simply switched off the fluorescents and used a couple (non-dimmed) incandescents while we were recording.
The noise from the fluorescents may not be RFI in the over-the-air sense. It may be introducting spikes into your power lines. Use high-quality surge supression and, if possible, power your audio gear with a dedicated circuit that's isolated from the one running the lights.
Standard fluorescents (I don't know about the CFs) create noise primarily at the A/C duty cycle, 60Hz in the US. You could try a tight notch filter at that rate. More of a kludge than a solution, but it might make it workable.
When Maxtor bought Quantum, there was a goof in converting employee stock options. The responsible department sent a mass email to the affected employees explaining the problem and the solution. It ended with the following line:
We apologize for any
incontinence this may have caused.
American photo ID's are not currently computer readable. There's no national standard other than passports, which don't lend themselves to this purpose.
Driver licenses and state ID cards for most states have a bar code, a mag stripe, or both. When travelling, I've watched officials swipe the bottom edge of the photo page of my US passport through an OCR machine. So I don't understand why you claim we don't have computer-readable ID cards here in the US. Perhaps because the computer isn't doing facial recognition?
The tax deduction for heavy trucks was intended to help small businesses buy trucks (which should have already been deductible on a depreciation schedule as a business expense), but, in practice, the deduction is being abused by lots of sole-proprietors and S-corps (real estate agents, dentists, lawyers, CPAs, etc.) to purchase large SUVs for personal use. They claim business use by saying at least half the miles are for commuting.
Search the Web for tax advisors who post lists of which SUVs qualify by weight. There are lots of them: H2, Escalade, Excursion, Cheyenne, etc. I think every major manufacturer has at least one SUV that qualifies for the deduction. Some add dead weight to the vehicle in order to make them qualify for the deduction and to move them out of the regulated categories for safety and fuel economy. It also happens to make them illegal on residential streets in many cities.
The fuel-efficient or alternative fuel car deduction, which was intended to help narrow the price gap between conventional cars and the efficient ones, drops to $1000 for 2005 despite the fact that the price of hybrids remains high and the only commercial electric cars still available have astronomical prices.
...are all "hypo-allergenic" breeds (don't produce dander).
It's not all about dander. Many of us have no problem with the dander but are allergic to the saliva, which--due to their grooming habits--is all over their fur. My doc says people who don't seem to be allergic to dogs but are allergic to cats are almost certainly reacting to the allergen in the saliva rather than the dander or the fur.
It goes to lengths to be fair and scientific in gathering the facts about the beliefs of the Bush and Kerry backers, but then just "assumes" with no evidence shown that the worldview of the Kerry side is correct, and the worldview of the Bush side is incorrect.
I call bullshit. Most of the "world view" metrics used are objective. Did the 9/11 Commission conclude there was a link between Saddam and al Qaeda? Did the Charles D. study conclude that Iraq had a significant weapons program in place? Does Bush support participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court? The answers to these questions are facts, not opinions.
Measuring being "in tune with the events" implies that there is an objective way to decide WHICH EVENTS are "the" events.
I suggest you browse some of the questions. Many of them are quite objective. Did the 9/11 Commission find a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? Does Bush support participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court? These don't depend on the study makers' views.
There is also an implicit value judgement that the "world attitude", whatever this means, is the correct one, or is one that you should be "in tune with". The US couldn't possibly be in the right if it ignores the "world attitude" could it?
I don't read any value judgement into that. Right or wrong, understanding the positions of your allies and your enemies can only be helpful. There's nothing wrong with acting unilaterally to protect your interests. Even so, doing so ignorant of how your actions are perceived is short-sighted.
Note, I'm not saying that the US did so with regard to Iraq. There are certainly many, many outside the US who were against it. How many I don't know. Maybe there were many allies who were quietly thrilled that we took out Saddam. Having a gauge on this is valuable information when choosing a strategy. Barring that, realizing that you don't know the extent of the support and the opposition is better than believing everyone is behind you.
Kerry supporters love to conclude that because we know NOW that Iraq had no WMD's in hand that Bush "made incorrect judgments before the war" (quoting the study). That does not follow -- based on the information available AT THE TIME, he assessed the risk and was unwilling to gamble on the "No WMD" option. Kerry supported the authorization of force, so he too agreed the risk was unacceptable. Only Kerry now wants it both ways because we have better information. The only reason we got that better information was because we removed Saddam and put in 1500 inspectors for a year.
I'm a Kerry supporter, but I think he blew it (as did most of my representatives) by authorizing the President to use force to "disarm" Iraq. I believed *at the time* that the case for WMDs was weak and that the connections to al Qaeda were nonexistant. Furthermore, it wasn't clear how invading Iraq and throwing it into chaos would have made searching for the weapons any easier. Despite earlier obstinance from Saddam, at the time of the authorization, the UN inspectors were getting virtually unfettered access in their search. WMDs were a poor excuse for invading. Kerry's judgement on that was just as bad as Bush's. But Bush had promised a stronger coallition and an exit strategy. Kerry's lapse in judgment was in believing the President's promise.
Okay people, quiz time. How many of you can guess the world view of corngrower, the submitter of this article? To give you a hint, here's his a paraphrase of his submission.
"A study on the perceptual fantasy worlds that voters live in demonstrates that Kerry voters' fantasy worlds are more real than the Bush voters' fantasy worlds!"
That seems to be a pretty accurate summary of the conclusions in the article, regardless of the submitter's position.
And if you're going to paraphrase, then the quotation marks are a little misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
In a public school, the principal is a government employee and an agent of the government. If he/she blocks content, then that is government-sponsered censorship. Here in California, we have an explicit law against such censorship of public school papers. Sadly, it's rarely enforced.
60 Minutes had a piece several weeks ago about the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation. They provide lots of private funding for medical research. And one of the projects they mentioned was the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines for research.
Actually, the online Mirriam-Webster dictionary says I can "steal a kiss" or "steal one's thunder". Neither of which deprives a victim of property. Tyrants can "steal our liberty" leaving us without something we had, but is liberty property?
M-W also lists "identity theft" (which does not leave anyone without an identity nor is an identity property). You can argue that copyrights shouldn't be treated as property, but, with our current laws and precedents, they are.
While it's true that--in legal terms--copyright infringement is not theft, I think the people who harp on this informal use of the language are off on a tangent. As attorney general, Ashcroft should have been more careful in his choice of words, but in general I see no harm in people referring to copyright infringement as theft or piracy
"Steal" has a long history of usage with abstractions that can't be taken in the sense you're trying to limit theft to. Consider:
Can you recommend a hardware firewall that works with dial-up? Do you know of a virus checker whose updates are small enough to be downloaded a few minutes at a time at 28.8 kbps*? While Windows updates are also trying to download?
* It's a 56 kbps modem, but it rarely connects at more than 28.8.
But the GPS unit still broadcasts information when it's off-road, on private property, in a private garage, outside the jurisdiction, etc. And how was the device planted? Under the hood or otherwise "inside" the vehicle?
Actually, in the enumeration of Congress's responsibilities, the US Consitution says:
So it's completely up to Congress how long to extend protection, provided that there is some limit. I think the 17 years figure is the old duration of patents--not copyrights.
There are significant tax benefits to buying some SUVs and nearly all motor homes that make them appear financially feasible to buyers. Both are typically financed with a loan. SUVs and motor homes themselves can be used a collateral to secure the loans. You might have a hard time convincing a loan officer at a bank that your cloned cat is worth something close to the amount you would have to borrow.
Accessibility is a main selling point of the electronic voting machines that worry so many of us Slashdotters. They have screen readers, large fonts, high contrast, and support multiple languages. This is a good thing for those who need these features.
Of course, a system we could trust would be a good thing for everyone.
And the US would never do anything that would make it look idiotic to the rest of the world.
Satellites need an accurate time source in order to maintain proper orbit and orientation. This used to mean building in an expensive atomic clock, not it means including a GPS receiver and using the GPS signal as the clock. I wonder, if GPS were selectively shut down over an area if that would impact other satellites.
Yes, one of the points of this talk (about two years ago) was the need for OpenEXR and how they hoped all the CGI tool providers would jump on board. But, at the time, they were still resorting to compression because they couldn't use a wide dynamic range all the way through the process. I don't know about the current status of OpenEXR.
The point made by the speaker was that the CGI tool makers did not support wide dynamic range and that was why ILM was pushing OpenEXR. Not all of their tools are home-grown. They use a lot of off-the-shelf products (hardware and software) which are built for 24-bit color.
I'm a little confused by some of the aritmetic. It looks like you multipled 19 square inches by a linear 2400 dpi.
Also, according to the New York Times piece on this guy, this first prototype is a very large format negative film camera, and the image is scanned from the negative on a drum scanner.
Aside from that, I think people spend too much time worrying about resolution and not enough about bit depth. I forget the exact numbers, but B&W negative film has a contrast range of 10 or 11 orders of magnitude. A B&W print is less. Color slides less, and color prints even less. But even a color print exceeds 24bpp (8 bits x RGB). Personally, I'd much rather look at projected slides than print.
I heard a talk by a visual effects guy from ILM who explained that when they have to composite live action from film with CGI (computer-generated imagery), the first thing they have to do is compress the contrast and color range to match the range of the CGI. If there are a lot of effects in the movie, they'll end up compressing the contrast for the entire film.
Another friend of mine who recently left ILM wouldn't tell me the actual resolution they use for visual effects (trade secret), but he implied it's much lower than you'd expect.
From Merriam-Webster online:
In a college recording studio I used, we simply switched off the fluorescents and used a couple (non-dimmed) incandescents while we were recording.
The noise from the fluorescents may not be RFI in the over-the-air sense. It may be introducting spikes into your power lines. Use high-quality surge supression and, if possible, power your audio gear with a dedicated circuit that's isolated from the one running the lights.
Standard fluorescents (I don't know about the CFs) create noise primarily at the A/C duty cycle, 60Hz in the US. You could try a tight notch filter at that rate. More of a kludge than a solution, but it might make it workable.
When Maxtor bought Quantum, there was a goof in converting employee stock options. The responsible department sent a mass email to the affected employees explaining the problem and the solution. It ended with the following line:
Love that spell checker!
Driver licenses and state ID cards for most states have a bar code, a mag stripe, or both. When travelling, I've watched officials swipe the bottom edge of the photo page of my US passport through an OCR machine. So I don't understand why you claim we don't have computer-readable ID cards here in the US. Perhaps because the computer isn't doing facial recognition?
The tax deduction for heavy trucks was intended to help small businesses buy trucks (which should have already been deductible on a depreciation schedule as a business expense), but, in practice, the deduction is being abused by lots of sole-proprietors and S-corps (real estate agents, dentists, lawyers, CPAs, etc.) to purchase large SUVs for personal use. They claim business use by saying at least half the miles are for commuting.
Search the Web for tax advisors who post lists of which SUVs qualify by weight. There are lots of them: H2, Escalade, Excursion, Cheyenne, etc. I think every major manufacturer has at least one SUV that qualifies for the deduction. Some add dead weight to the vehicle in order to make them qualify for the deduction and to move them out of the regulated categories for safety and fuel economy. It also happens to make them illegal on residential streets in many cities.
The fuel-efficient or alternative fuel car deduction, which was intended to help narrow the price gap between conventional cars and the efficient ones, drops to $1000 for 2005 despite the fact that the price of hybrids remains high and the only commercial electric cars still available have astronomical prices.
Why not? We've been hearing for decades how our education system is getting worse and worse. Maybe it's catching up with us.
When you lose a Presidential election, at what point does your Secret Service protection end? Day after election day? Moment you concede? January 20?
But it's cheaper than the co-pay for my allergy prescriptions over the lifetime of a typical house cat.
It's not all about dander. Many of us have no problem with the dander but are allergic to the saliva, which--due to their grooming habits--is all over their fur. My doc says people who don't seem to be allergic to dogs but are allergic to cats are almost certainly reacting to the allergen in the saliva rather than the dander or the fur.
I call bullshit. Most of the "world view" metrics used are objective. Did the 9/11 Commission conclude there was a link between Saddam and al Qaeda? Did the Charles D. study conclude that Iraq had a significant weapons program in place? Does Bush support participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court? The answers to these questions are facts, not opinions.
I suggest you browse some of the questions. Many of them are quite objective. Did the 9/11 Commission find a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein? Does Bush support participation in the Kyoto agreement or the world court? These don't depend on the study makers' views.
I don't read any value judgement into that. Right or wrong, understanding the positions of your allies and your enemies can only be helpful. There's nothing wrong with acting unilaterally to protect your interests. Even so, doing so ignorant of how your actions are perceived is short-sighted.
Note, I'm not saying that the US did so with regard to Iraq. There are certainly many, many outside the US who were against it. How many I don't know. Maybe there were many allies who were quietly thrilled that we took out Saddam. Having a gauge on this is valuable information when choosing a strategy. Barring that, realizing that you don't know the extent of the support and the opposition is better than believing everyone is behind you.
I'm a Kerry supporter, but I think he blew it (as did most of my representatives) by authorizing the President to use force to "disarm" Iraq. I believed *at the time* that the case for WMDs was weak and that the connections to al Qaeda were nonexistant. Furthermore, it wasn't clear how invading Iraq and throwing it into chaos would have made searching for the weapons any easier. Despite earlier obstinance from Saddam, at the time of the authorization, the UN inspectors were getting virtually unfettered access in their search. WMDs were a poor excuse for invading. Kerry's judgement on that was just as bad as Bush's. But Bush had promised a stronger coallition and an exit strategy. Kerry's lapse in judgment was in believing the President's promise.
That seems to be a pretty accurate summary of the conclusions in the article, regardless of the submitter's position.
And if you're going to paraphrase, then the quotation marks are a little misleading.