Generally map publishers do not gather their own data. It would be a monumental task, probably costing in the hundreds of millions to a billions of dollars for a full road map of the USA.
They get the data free from the US government, who conveniently doesn't publish their data to the public anymore.
I feel that they should NOT be entitled to lock up data when all they did was package and resell it.
Still, even if you did collect it yourself, I don't feel it's in my interest (or society's) to allow any restrictions on the database. In the case of baseball, the statistics will still be compiled since they would loose way too much money by not having them in circulation. For maps, the government gets the data, so even with copyright the only ones bothered are the end consumers, who lack the means of using or finding the free government data. In most cases, someone or some group will want the data badly enough, and will pay for it to be collected. There's also nothing stopping the government from collecting the data (navigation charts, weather data, and topographical maps are all done with government data), and it generally does data collection better than private groups.
Statistics have not a trace of artistic merit. Copyright is supposed to promote the arts and sciences, not sports. The way the law is written (but usually not interpreted), a work must have some creative element to be copyrightable.
It's like copyrighting weather records (not forecasts). Oh wait, the private forcasters are already lobbying on that one.
While Macintosh users aren't even in the same league as Microsoft users, they're still substantially more vulnerable than Linux users.
Macintosh has a good chunk of proprietary code. It's almost certain that it's vulnerable by design to US government viruses like Magic Lantern. It's also a good fraction of the OS that suffers from the security weaknesses of consumer/business-grade proprietary code.
Macs also mean a homogenous population to infect, much like the MS population.
Macintosh users are also often full of hubris (hubris seems to go in line with how much cash a person shelled out, and if the item is used as a status symbol). This makes them all the more likely not to follow proper safety procedures.
The Disney examples are relevant because they're perfect examples of the military-industrial complex. It's also why Disney hates people mentioning the films. The films are the primary sources. Not copying parts (or the whole) of the film is like writing a paper using only secondary sources. It's far less credible. It's like writing a paper about Soviet or Nazi propaganda without having the propaganda materials available to corroborate your claims.
Virtually noone watches those films for pleasure. Today, they're entirely political and historical.
Well the disney movies and the news articles are trying to use someone elses speech. It isn't really your free speech.
The disney examples are generally attacking Disney and the US government, and are in a totally different class, but here's to addressing the later: Free discourse should not put any hinderences to expression. Often the easiest way to express oneself is to reference or flat out copy (with attribution) already written statements. Blogs are good example of this in practice.
Oh, and I can add another item to the list of copyright vs. free speech: Scientology. Look up http://www.xenu.net/ for how they use copyright to sick lawyers at their critics.
speech and expression are copyrightable and copyrights can impinge on free expression.
One example I can think off right away is Disney's WWII propaganda films. They're illegal to copy due to copyright (WWII wasn't that long age) and Disney refuses to sell new copies, yet they're very important in the study of racism, US history, fascism, and corporate-government relationships - all quite relevant to today's political discourse.
Another is that documentaries must get copyright clearance if so little as a TV is in the background of one of their shots or a radio can be heard, however faintly, in the background. For politically sensitive documentaries, that clearance is often hard to get for any price. Though there exists 'fair use', it is so painful for a court to rule against you that directors will just not use the material.
Copyright also means that one must get permission to copy virtually any news article to promote your agenda. While it's usually possible to rewrite everything and hire a staff to take pictures for your use, this makes free speech a priviledge of the very wealthy, since it is extremely expensive to get world news firsthand and expediently without copying.
DRM (which gets its leverage via copyright) intrudes far, far worse - essentially implenting prior restraint.
One would think that the 1st Amemdment would trump whatever is in the constitution, since amendments are changes to the constitution and thus supercede whatever they changed.
I wonder where our current creative interpretation that copyright trumps the 1st amendment came from?
PS: The most vague and stretched term in the constitution + amendments would have to be the Elastic Clause. Copyright is a close contender though.
History has shown otherwise. The African and American nations were all invaded around 1500 despite having almost no military strength and most are still feeling the effects of it. The USSR and USA never went to war largely because of MAD (mutually assured destruction).
If China is smart, they will keep their military spending up to stay competitive with the US. After all, overspending will just cost them a little of the enormous production and labor supply. Underspending could cost them their sovereignty and future. China only became independent about 60 years ago and, like any country, neither their people nor the government wants to be invaded. Even if they are not invaded, a weak military will allow other countries to force lousy economic treaties on them, which is also against their best interests.
Airplanes will most likely carry both GPS and Galileo receivers. Ships and planes carry plenty of redundant navigational equipment. To have two satellite systems can only increase safety.
But what would be the problem with resubmitting a bubble sort you already wrote? If you already did it once, what is there to prove by writing it again.
Also, my experience is that simple algorithms look awfully similar, occasionally with byte for byte identical code, when I re-implement them. I'm very methodical and I have a very strict way of structuring code. All that might change are variable names, but for most school algorithms, it's usually i, j, and n, so little room for creativity there. I'm quite lousy with comments for rushed jobs (like all class assignments are), so not much to go by there (I also don't see the point of descriptive or narrative commenting when the project is 1,000 lines long and only has a single developer).
How can anything be self plagiarism? Plagiarism means not giving credit where credit is due. If you wrote the assignment once, handing it again under your name is still giving proper attribution.
If I understood properly, the evil of plagiarism is that you're misleading the reader as to who wrote it. Either it's not plagiarism or the university in question has some misleading definition of plagiarism. I understand why a university would be opposed to it (it wants a certain amount of work out of you), but calling it plagiarism is like calling sharing stealing.
Apparently pulsars can sustain incredibly powerful magnetic fields and still remain in this dimension. Even mutual electron-electron repulsion (the strongest manifestation of the electromagnetic force with baryonic matter) is incapable of holding the atoms apart, so the electrons and protons merge, making a soup of neutrons (which are held apart by the strong nuclear force if I remember correctly).
Anything we build is based on the electromagnetic force (bolts, welding, internal cohesion, adhesives, magnetic containment, etc are all electromagnetic in nature). The electromagnetic force, strong as it is in everyday life, is just to weak to maintain the magnetic flux densities found on a neutral star, no less whatever that magic density is that would cause a dimensional rift (which isn't a proven thing - all that is known is that it'll cause a black hole, whatever that is).
If there is some way to have FLT, then it'll show up first in odd experimental results showing that our theories are less than perfect (they're not, but getting better every year). I would put the shortest odds on gravity behaving oddly at small (sub-millimeter) scales, but so far gravity works as the inverse square for all the experiments executed so far.
Steam deserves to be criticized, because it stinks worse than a skunk two weeks dead. Conventional DRM is annoying enough, and all but the weakest DRM (like that found on Galactic Civilizations) is enough to break the sale. Blizzard's DRM is such that if they go out of business, I cannot play my games anymore.
Essentially if the DRM either phones home or requires the CD to be in the drive, I'm not going to buy it. Download services are okay in principal (Sourceforge doesn't offend me), but only if they're not linked to DRM like the majority are.
Out of my 20GB collection, I've deleted about 15GB off the HDD (still on CDR backups, but no instant access) and in the year that's followed, I've only fetched the discs once. Whenever I have an urge for some music, it just happens that it's in the 5GB I left.
It's nice to have the remaining 15GB on secondary storage, either for that rare case I misjudge or for making copies for others, but no need to store it on a depreciating and energy guzzling HDD. (depreciation about equals the energy bill with my HDDs, which average about 105 GB per drive). For the modern era, HDDs are bigger now, but DVD-Rs are practical too, about sextupling the data/disc of CDRs.
Hmm, that's an idea. An mp3 player that plays DVD-Rs. Can store an entire music library on a handful of discs.
Re:Could be that iPod owners have more...
on
iPod Owners Not Thieves
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Perhaps because their capacity is so damned huge. But the marginal benefit to go from 4GB to 60GB is very small, much smaller than from a CD player to 4GB. It's like saying projection TVs are cheaper per square inch than CRTs: projection TVs are still fairly pricey and most people cannot use them to their fullest for lack of a large enough living room and a good enough sound system.
Most people couldn't fathom of filling up 60GB with music, particularly paid music, so either they're clueless about purchasing decisions, or they're buying the large Ipods for something else, namely prestige.
Not only that, but it also prevents people from improving on the patented idea or adapting it for other uses. The patent holder of this regenerative braking patent was never, ever going to enter the auto industry, and if they did, I'd rather buy a Gremlin than whatever crap they'd come up with (it's very expensive to design a good car, doubly so if you're going to be a start-up with no experience).
Heck, the patent holder most likely would have built their product back when they did anyway. The major money is in the design, not the brainstorming (and this patent, like most patents, is essentially a product of brainstorming - which is repeated countless times across the globe).
Maybe Diesels don't store their energy, but many electric locomotives send the energy back to the grid upon braking.
Either way, shouldn't regenerative braking be an obvious step once you have battery technology (invented), electric motors (invented), and a will to trade money for efficiency (business decision).
Actually, it's based on what people will bear. If he guesses that his neighboring merchants will raise prices a lot, he'll follow along since he can safely do so. If he feels they will hold their prices, he'll be forced to hold also else loose many customers.
Katrina was a good example. Citgo held their prices to a fairly mild increase (about how much the wholesale gasoline market increased). In locales with a Citgo station, the competition was forced to keep their prices lower than in locales without one. This effect was most pronounced in the Gulf and Florida regions, because of the fear that gasoline supplies had been cut. Citgo was driven by an edict from President Chavez rather than any economic decision, but it still effected what the competition could charge.
They also tend to be incredibly lazy. Many people I know won't even try Linux because they don't want to switch, but they can't even use MS Windows with any reasonable proficiency because they never spent any time trying to learn how to use it but have a little script by their desk for how to load MS Word and open a file or how to connect to the internet and check e-mail. Invariably their computers are loaded with spyware and only half functional and they would be far better served by Linux.
Actually, we're quite spotty when it comes to kids. We give them one of the worst educations in the developed world and we spend very little time with them. Our car-centric society isn't exactly beneficial for kids either. Children are much more likely to be in poverty than adults. Kids are on the receiving end of the worst that our marketing profession can deliver.
All kids are is a great excuse for minority interests to push through things that would have a hard time passing otherwise (war on drugs, war on video games, war on porn, etc).
In my opinion, neither copyrights nor patents encourage progress. Copyright is also in the hands of a select few trusts (RIAA, MPAA, BSA - all consolidating the power of already very large corporations).
The goal of both the patent and the copyright industries is to squash startups and maximize profits. This leads to stagnation and very little innovation, but lots of marketing and public relations.
Forced to chose between the two, I would get rid of patents first, but I would like to see both eliminated.
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Generally map publishers do not gather their own data. It would be a monumental task, probably costing in the hundreds of millions to a billions of dollars for a full road map of the USA.
They get the data free from the US government, who conveniently doesn't publish their data to the public anymore.
I feel that they should NOT be entitled to lock up data when all they did was package and resell it.
Still, even if you did collect it yourself, I don't feel it's in my interest (or society's) to allow any restrictions on the database. In the case of baseball, the statistics will still be compiled since they would loose way too much money by not having them in circulation. For maps, the government gets the data, so even with copyright the only ones bothered are the end consumers, who lack the means of using or finding the free government data. In most cases, someone or some group will want the data badly enough, and will pay for it to be collected. There's also nothing stopping the government from collecting the data (navigation charts, weather data, and topographical maps are all done with government data), and it generally does data collection better than private groups.
It should be a no-brainer.
Statistics have not a trace of artistic merit. Copyright is supposed to promote the arts and sciences, not sports. The way the law is written (but usually not interpreted), a work must have some creative element to be copyrightable.
It's like copyrighting weather records (not forecasts). Oh wait, the private forcasters are already lobbying on that one.
While Macintosh users aren't even in the same league as Microsoft users, they're still substantially more vulnerable than Linux users.
Macintosh has a good chunk of proprietary code. It's almost certain that it's vulnerable by design to US government viruses like Magic Lantern. It's also a good fraction of the OS that suffers from the security weaknesses of consumer/business-grade proprietary code.
Macs also mean a homogenous population to infect, much like the MS population.
Macintosh users are also often full of hubris (hubris seems to go in line with how much cash a person shelled out, and if the item is used as a status symbol). This makes them all the more likely not to follow proper safety procedures.
The Disney examples are relevant because they're perfect examples of the military-industrial complex. It's also why Disney hates people mentioning the films. The films are the primary sources. Not copying parts (or the whole) of the film is like writing a paper using only secondary sources. It's far less credible. It's like writing a paper about Soviet or Nazi propaganda without having the propaganda materials available to corroborate your claims.
Virtually noone watches those films for pleasure. Today, they're entirely political and historical.
Well the disney movies and the news articles are trying to use someone elses speech. It isn't really your free speech.
The disney examples are generally attacking Disney and the US government, and are in a totally different class, but here's to addressing the later: Free discourse should not put any hinderences to expression. Often the easiest way to express oneself is to reference or flat out copy (with attribution) already written statements. Blogs are good example of this in practice.
Oh, and I can add another item to the list of copyright vs. free speech: Scientology. Look up http://www.xenu.net/ for how they use copyright to sick lawyers at their critics.
speech and expression are copyrightable and copyrights can impinge on free expression.
One example I can think off right away is Disney's WWII propaganda films. They're illegal to copy due to copyright (WWII wasn't that long age) and Disney refuses to sell new copies, yet they're very important in the study of racism, US history, fascism, and corporate-government relationships - all quite relevant to today's political discourse.
Another is that documentaries must get copyright clearance if so little as a TV is in the background of one of their shots or a radio can be heard, however faintly, in the background. For politically sensitive documentaries, that clearance is often hard to get for any price. Though there exists 'fair use', it is so painful for a court to rule against you that directors will just not use the material.
Copyright also means that one must get permission to copy virtually any news article to promote your agenda. While it's usually possible to rewrite everything and hire a staff to take pictures for your use, this makes free speech a priviledge of the very wealthy, since it is extremely expensive to get world news firsthand and expediently without copying.
DRM (which gets its leverage via copyright) intrudes far, far worse - essentially implenting prior restraint.
telnetd and ftpd are now disabled by default in favor of sshd, which is optional (just like telnetd and ftpd are optional).
Meanwhile, MS Windows still uses the notoriously crackable Net BIOS daemon which must be running on pretty much every machine.
Damn. I thought you were trolling, but I looked it up (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4566526.stm) and you're right.
The copyright holders (Sony et al) get a good chunk of it and they have authorized the broadcasts, just like Itunes.
One would think that the 1st Amemdment would trump whatever is in the constitution, since amendments are changes to the constitution and thus supercede whatever they changed.
I wonder where our current creative interpretation that copyright trumps the 1st amendment came from?
PS: The most vague and stretched term in the constitution + amendments would have to be the Elastic Clause. Copyright is a close contender though.
History has shown otherwise. The African and American nations were all invaded around 1500 despite having almost no military strength and most are still feeling the effects of it. The USSR and USA never went to war largely because of MAD (mutually assured destruction).
If China is smart, they will keep their military spending up to stay competitive with the US. After all, overspending will just cost them a little of the enormous production and labor supply. Underspending could cost them their sovereignty and future. China only became independent about 60 years ago and, like any country, neither their people nor the government wants to be invaded. Even if they are not invaded, a weak military will allow other countries to force lousy economic treaties on them, which is also against their best interests.
Airplanes will most likely carry both GPS and Galileo receivers. Ships and planes carry plenty of redundant navigational equipment. To have two satellite systems can only increase safety.
But what would be the problem with resubmitting a bubble sort you already wrote? If you already did it once, what is there to prove by writing it again.
Also, my experience is that simple algorithms look awfully similar, occasionally with byte for byte identical code, when I re-implement them. I'm very methodical and I have a very strict way of structuring code. All that might change are variable names, but for most school algorithms, it's usually i, j, and n, so little room for creativity there. I'm quite lousy with comments for rushed jobs (like all class assignments are), so not much to go by there (I also don't see the point of descriptive or narrative commenting when the project is 1,000 lines long and only has a single developer).
How can anything be self plagiarism? Plagiarism means not giving credit where credit is due. If you wrote the assignment once, handing it again under your name is still giving proper attribution.
If I understood properly, the evil of plagiarism is that you're misleading the reader as to who wrote it. Either it's not plagiarism or the university in question has some misleading definition of plagiarism. I understand why a university would be opposed to it (it wants a certain amount of work out of you), but calling it plagiarism is like calling sharing stealing.
Apparently pulsars can sustain incredibly powerful magnetic fields and still remain in this dimension. Even mutual electron-electron repulsion (the strongest manifestation of the electromagnetic force with baryonic matter) is incapable of holding the atoms apart, so the electrons and protons merge, making a soup of neutrons (which are held apart by the strong nuclear force if I remember correctly).
Anything we build is based on the electromagnetic force (bolts, welding, internal cohesion, adhesives, magnetic containment, etc are all electromagnetic in nature). The electromagnetic force, strong as it is in everyday life, is just to weak to maintain the magnetic flux densities found on a neutral star, no less whatever that magic density is that would cause a dimensional rift (which isn't a proven thing - all that is known is that it'll cause a black hole, whatever that is).
If there is some way to have FLT, then it'll show up first in odd experimental results showing that our theories are less than perfect (they're not, but getting better every year). I would put the shortest odds on gravity behaving oddly at small (sub-millimeter) scales, but so far gravity works as the inverse square for all the experiments executed so far.
Steam deserves to be criticized, because it stinks worse than a skunk two weeks dead. Conventional DRM is annoying enough, and all but the weakest DRM (like that found on Galactic Civilizations) is enough to break the sale. Blizzard's DRM is such that if they go out of business, I cannot play my games anymore.
Essentially if the DRM either phones home or requires the CD to be in the drive, I'm not going to buy it. Download services are okay in principal (Sourceforge doesn't offend me), but only if they're not linked to DRM like the majority are.
Out of my 20GB collection, I've deleted about 15GB off the HDD (still on CDR backups, but no instant access) and in the year that's followed, I've only fetched the discs once. Whenever I have an urge for some music, it just happens that it's in the 5GB I left.
It's nice to have the remaining 15GB on secondary storage, either for that rare case I misjudge or for making copies for others, but no need to store it on a depreciating and energy guzzling HDD. (depreciation about equals the energy bill with my HDDs, which average about 105 GB per drive). For the modern era, HDDs are bigger now, but DVD-Rs are practical too, about sextupling the data/disc of CDRs.
Hmm, that's an idea. An mp3 player that plays DVD-Rs. Can store an entire music library on a handful of discs.
Perhaps because their capacity is so damned huge. But the marginal benefit to go from 4GB to 60GB is very small, much smaller than from a CD player to 4GB. It's like saying projection TVs are cheaper per square inch than CRTs: projection TVs are still fairly pricey and most people cannot use them to their fullest for lack of a large enough living room and a good enough sound system.
Most people couldn't fathom of filling up 60GB with music, particularly paid music, so either they're clueless about purchasing decisions, or they're buying the large Ipods for something else, namely prestige.
Not only that, but it also prevents people from improving on the patented idea or adapting it for other uses. The patent holder of this regenerative braking patent was never, ever going to enter the auto industry, and if they did, I'd rather buy a Gremlin than whatever crap they'd come up with (it's very expensive to design a good car, doubly so if you're going to be a start-up with no experience).
Heck, the patent holder most likely would have built their product back when they did anyway. The major money is in the design, not the brainstorming (and this patent, like most patents, is essentially a product of brainstorming - which is repeated countless times across the globe).
Maybe Diesels don't store their energy, but many electric locomotives send the energy back to the grid upon braking.
Either way, shouldn't regenerative braking be an obvious step once you have battery technology (invented), electric motors (invented), and a will to trade money for efficiency (business decision).
Actually, it's based on what people will bear. If he guesses that his neighboring merchants will raise prices a lot, he'll follow along since he can safely do so. If he feels they will hold their prices, he'll be forced to hold also else loose many customers.
Katrina was a good example. Citgo held their prices to a fairly mild increase (about how much the wholesale gasoline market increased). In locales with a Citgo station, the competition was forced to keep their prices lower than in locales without one. This effect was most pronounced in the Gulf and Florida regions, because of the fear that gasoline supplies had been cut. Citgo was driven by an edict from President Chavez rather than any economic decision, but it still effected what the competition could charge.
They also tend to be incredibly lazy. Many people I know won't even try Linux because they don't want to switch, but they can't even use MS Windows with any reasonable proficiency because they never spent any time trying to learn how to use it but have a little script by their desk for how to load MS Word and open a file or how to connect to the internet and check e-mail. Invariably their computers are loaded with spyware and only half functional and they would be far better served by Linux.
Patents apply to both the device and the use of the device.
The flash card manufacturer, floppy drive manufacturer, OS distributor, and probably the OS writer are all violating the patent.
Actually, we're quite spotty when it comes to kids. We give them one of the worst educations in the developed world and we spend very little time with them. Our car-centric society isn't exactly beneficial for kids either. Children are much more likely to be in poverty than adults. Kids are on the receiving end of the worst that our marketing profession can deliver.
All kids are is a great excuse for minority interests to push through things that would have a hard time passing otherwise (war on drugs, war on video games, war on porn, etc).
In my opinion, neither copyrights nor patents encourage progress. Copyright is also in the hands of a select few trusts (RIAA, MPAA, BSA - all consolidating the power of already very large corporations).
The goal of both the patent and the copyright industries is to squash startups and maximize profits. This leads to stagnation and very little innovation, but lots of marketing and public relations.
Forced to chose between the two, I would get rid of patents first, but I would like to see both eliminated.
1/4 inch thick aluminium punch cards. Well kept, will last a billion years.