True, between driving an urban assault vehicle 5 miles each way to pick up a few dozen grams of plastic is wasteful compared to disposable DVDs (so long as you don't drive 5 miles to the supermarket just to get the DVD), but that's the worst case.
Disposable DVDs have more issues than just the waste of the disc itself. The DVDs come in airtight packaging that must also fit marketing and anti-shoplifting requirements. The packaging probably has more mass than the disc itself. Plastic takes about 2 kilos of oil to make 1 kilo of plastic (the other kilo is burnt for energy). The discs and their packaging must be transported to the store.
Driving 1 mile in a 30mpg car is going to take 1/30 gal or 1/8 l or about 100g of fuel. The disc will need about 1/2 kg to 1 kg of oil in its life cycle. For a 5-10 mile round trip, it's about even in terms of energy efficiency.
However, with a decently laid out city (a road grid instead of cul-de-sacs, denser housing, mixed commercial and residential zoning), there will be enough rental places that most people are within 1/2 mile of the nearest shop. This way they can easily walk there, and there is plenty of competition to keep prices reasonable.
With this system, the disposable DVD becomes quite awful compared to returning the disc in terms of energy use.
1 - There is no lower bound for what is copyright infringement. Copying 3 notes from a song has been found to be infringement.
2 - One of the tests for fair use is does it affect the marketability of the original work. In this case it does, since the kids aren't paying their monopoly dues.
3 - Copyright is horribly in favor of copyright holders in this country (and many others).
Copyright is totalitarian. It uses the force of law to prevent me from doing stuff. It requires active policing (ie., raids and arrests). Getting rid of copyrights (and associated contracts/licenses) don't require this. On top of that, the natural state is for there to be no copyright.
No license that I've seen requires publishing of derivatives, they only require you not to restrict redistribution. In other words, they only require you not to act totalitarian towards the people who got copies from you.
Why do people think Itunes is so great? In terms of money going to the artists, it's almost as bad as buying a CD in the store (11% gross goes to the artist, and we all know how much is left over after all is said and done).
Compound that with files that aren't cleartext mp3 or ogg and I can't pay anonymously with cash (hard to do on the internet), and it's no better than buying a CD.
I guess hell will be a very cold place before I will declare my boycott of the RIAA and its members over.
That it requires a credit card also rules them out, since I'm also boycotting them for various moral and privary reasons.
I think there's also the saturation effect. There's so many harsh laws that you have to prioritize. I don't like either law, but I'm going to fight the Patriot Act that I completely detest before going after a law that I just feel is too harsh, but where I agree with the basic premise of keeping drunks off the road.
"I would like some rice, lentils, water, and sugar." - OK "I would like some rice, lentils, and some water and sugar." - OK "I would like the following: rice, lentils, water and sugar." - OK "I would like some rice, lentils, water and sugar." - WRONG
The first two are quite clear. In the first one, all four items are seperate and I would like four dishes. In the second I would like three dishes, the third consisting of sugar and water.
The third is OK, but when the rule is commonly ignored (like with double negatives), it becomes ambiguous. In this case, the water and sugar are together.
The fourth is ambiguous. Are the sugar and water grouped together?
Actually there is an association between copyright, copyleft, and politics.
Note: I am assuming that having no copyrights includes a ban on any contracts tying the purchase, lease, or acquisition of any information or art to anything else, as EULAs would make the non-existance of copyright a moot point if they are allowed.
Copyrights fly against left-wing ideals of equality and the common good, as copyrights destroy wealth (through their monopoly effects, which prevent supply and demand from meeting at the price of zero) and copyrights take wealth from the masses and concentrate them in the hands of a few rich people.
Copyrights can be either liked or disliked by right wingers, depending on what type they are. On the one hand, the same arguments used in favor of SUVs (that the government should not be telling us what to drive) can be used against copyright (the government shouldn't be telling us what we can't copy). On the other hand, right wingers argue that without copyright, there would be no incentive to create (tell that to the people who've written GNU/Linux).
Personally, I am a left winger and I love copyleft/hate copyright.
To make it more confusing, you have all the people who buy the "starving artist" rhetoric. There's two major points against using copyright to fix this one. 1 - Right now, the money doesn't go to the starving artists. 99% goes to the record company (music). Other branches fare a little better, but not much. 2 - Giving money to the Endowment for the Arts or PBS or NPR (either as private donations or from public monies) would get a lot more bang for the buck, since advertising is a very costly way of funding things and private media companies seem to spend $2 marketing for $1 of production. Not that it would solve the unemployment problem among artists, since art is fun and many people want to do it, even for low pay.
There is also the "copying is theft" argument, which I find idiotic. "Stealing someone's idea", or more precisely "Claiming someone else's idea as your own", is a special form of lying known as plagarism, but how that relates to general copying, I don't know. Copying is neither stealing nor sharing, but something even better, as I will demonstrate.
There are eight kids in a room with a single coloring book. They have three options. 1 - Fight over it. If the book is still in one piece afterwards, the victor gets the book. Not very nice, and half the fun of coloring is having people around anyway. 2 - Share the book. Perhaps a few pages can be torn out for each person, or perhaps the book can be passed around, or perhaps all 8 kids can draw at the same time. Defineately some awkwardness or loss either way it's done, but better than option 1. 3 - Make 8 copies of the book (and store the original just in case). Now everyone can have their own book.
I haven't mentioned the author, since (s)he's not in this scene, in the same way that an architect or laborer has no business interfering with a house they built after selling it.
I don't see how copy-protected is any less double-speak than digital rights management. In fact, I hate copy-protected more, since it can't be easily morphed into the phrase "digital restriction management".
Copy protection would logically refer to stuff like error correction that would ensure that even if the copy process wasn't perfect, the copy could be used. A RAID would be a good example of this. Source code escrow accounts for clients would be another form of copy protection.
My favorite term is crippled, since it is dead-on and it has the proper (negative) connotation.
When calculating the expense of eating out it is important to figure in the when spending an hour or more in the kitchen cooking, you are not making money.
Eating out takes a long time too. You have to get to the place and back, as well as wait for the food to be prepared and eat it. If you're eating fast food, the preparation time would be low, but you still have to get to and from the place.
If you eat in, depending on what you cook, it can take very little time. Pasta takes about 5-10 minutes of time, since you can leave the stove unattended for most of the time. Potatoes, rice, string beans, beans, lentils, and many other foods take a similar amount of time. Fruits take 0 time, since they're usually eaten raw.
Meat would probably take longer (not sure since I never cook and rarely eat meat), but it's not very healthy and it's quite messy to clean up.
Not to mention I'm certain that shushi, food in the raw, low carb, or whatever resturant I'm in the mood for today will do a much better job of creating a well balanced, healthy, and well presented meal than I can.
Most restaurant food is not very healthy, particularly fast food.
As a final note, both your income and restaurant food is taxed (at least in NY). Assuming your marginal tax rate is 30% and the sales tax is 8.75% (NY has a very high sales tax, and restaurants are taxed), a $5 fast food meal would cost you $7.77 in pre-tax income. A dollar saved is worth more than a dollar earned after taking taxes into account.
No, a gravity assist doesn't affect the rotation speed one bit. It only affects the orbital speed (and thus the length of a year).
An outward assist (when the spacecraft is sped up) causes the year to get shorter, and an inward assist (when the spacecraft is slowed down) causes the year to get longer.
The military is about $500B a year. 3x that would be $1.5T a year. There is no way the US federal government is spending $1.5T on education. It's somewhere south of $100B. Local government pays for most education expenses.
Now the total US education spending is substantial (about $400B for K-12 education [primary and secondary school, but not college]), but it's not even as much as we spend on the military, no less 3x that. 4% of GDP on education is by no long shot overspending.
It's not unmetered either. Unmetered means not measured. If you're not measuring usage, that means you have no way to figure out who's using a lot of bandwidth or not.
The proper (but not so effective) term would be metered at no marginal cost.
I fully agree. Copyright and patent law should be repealed, to be replaced by an anti-plagarism law. I'm going to throw in trade secrets and (partially) trademarks too.
Not only is copyright unnatural, but it flies in the face of most moral codes (sharing is good, people should help others, etc), it is horribly inefficient from an economic standpoint, and is horribly unjust from a socialist standpoint, and it is horrible from a civil liberties standpoint for multiple reasons.
Copyright is unnatural:
- Common sense says that what I do privately is noone else's business.
Copyright is immoral:
- Depends on your belief system, but if it includes things like "sharing is good" or "do onto others as you would want them to do onto you", then copyright runs flatly against it. For the do onto others idea, it is in almost everyone's personal interest not to respect copyright and not to have their copyright's respected in exchange. Do onto others cuts both ways. If you get a great benefit for a small pain to someone else, it's OK under that system, just so long as you allow others to do the same.
- Plagarism is another story and most moral codes are strongly against it, since it is lying.
Copyright is horribly inefficient economically:
- Copyright is an absolute monopoly. Under a monopoly, a profit-maximizing company will price the product far higher than the socially optimum and 'free-market' price. In the case of copyrighted material, this is often a factor of 10-1 to 1,000-1 in price. While some money is transferred from buyer to monopoly, a lot of value is lost in the process too, as any ECON101 course will teach you.
- Collecting payment is costly. On top of the monopoly losses, selling CDs, as opposed to giving them away, costs quite a bit in billing (credit card, cashier, insurance, etc) and handling (theft prevention, since $20 CDs are worth stealing, but $.20 ones are not). This probably amounts to a dollar or two per CD bought. Preventing counterfitting also costs resources, both for the seller for the prevention measures, and for society at large because of the restrictions that they must put up with.
Copyright is horribly unjust from a socialist point of view:
- Copyrights move money from the poor and middle-class to the rich. Most spending on copyrighted items are from poor and lower middle class people, who spend a large share of their income on advertisments (not literally, but ads distort people's buying senses and cause people to overconsume), cable TV, music, movies, books, and software.
- Copyrights lends itself to vertically intergrated media companies (the same company controls distribution and creation). This allows the big companies to deny independant creators from being distributed, and independant distributors from having anything to distribute. Abolishing copyright would allow independant distributers (ie., P2P) to compete on equal terms, and it would make the expense of an integrated company prohibitive. The social ill of integrated companies is that they have the power to shape the news and social norms via the content they commission.
- Copyright lowers the standard of living for poor and middle-class people. Anything that lowers the standard of living without a good reason is unjust.
Copyright is horribly against civil liberties:
- Copyright infringes on a basic freedom - the freedom to do anything that doesn't effect the environment or harm others. Being harmed and loosing out on ill-gotten profits are very different, and it usally boils down to common sense.
- Copyright allows for supression of news and bending of culture, because it lends itself towards media comglomerates.
Patents are also bad for many of the same reasons, especially the economic ones, and should be abolished as well.
Trademarks are overly powerful, but because they serve a useful purpose (linking a manufacturer to a product), they should be merely reigned in. To serve this end and only this end, 'trademark dilution' sh
Even better would be open-source hardware. Although you wouldn't be able to 'compile' your chip layouts at home, any manufacturer or government could make them, and anyone could write drivers for them.
If open-source hardware even became competitive in performance to closed-source hardware, the cheaper price and the (hopefully) standardized interfaces will eat the lunch of the closed-source hardware.
And if you sneeze in my face and don't cover your mouth, I'll be angry.
Just like you should cover your mouth and turn away to sneeze, you should try to get into an empty room, or at least talk at a low level and keep it brief if you can't.
They is probably an attempt to kill Linux and the GPL. Even if the fee is 1 cent per copy, the fact that any patent restriction exists means that GPL code implementing FAT can't be destributed.
Microsoft probably settled on 25 cents instead of.000000001 cents so that it doesn't look too obvious.
That aside, I've been using FAT since I was a kid. My first computer in 1990 used FAT, so how are they getting a patent in 1995 on it?
No, put a strong enough barrier around any charged partible and tunneling will stop (most of the time).
Alpha particles in gold seem to stay put even over geological time scales without tunneling the femtometre to freedom (about 10^-15 m). That is because the strong nuclear force holding them in has a very high potential, as well as the greater momentum of an alpha particle (which reduces the heisenburg effect, but not enough to fully explain for the lack of tunneling)
The problem is applying a strong field on an electron in a gate. If we could get a 1MV potential into the gate, we'd have no problem, but we can't, so that's our problem. Diamond won't help us much, if at all, in that respect.
Yes, economics do work when zero is in the denominator, and they don't paint a pretty picture for the music industry.
Let's go through core numbers for the capitalist model (the one they teach you in school), which is that maximum efficiency is when marginal price (MP) equals marginal cost (MC).
MP=MC occurs when price = $0, since marginal cost is $0.
What this means is that the music industry is most efficient for our country at price = $0. Unlike most other goods, having a gluttonous appetite for music doesn't cost our society any resources, be they labor or raw materials.
This does leave the issue of paying for the capital costs (recording the original songs), which must be paid somehow. Forturnately, they're small, and fame, non-CD revenues (concerts), and the fact that many musicians aren't in it for the money will keep capital production (ie., song writing and recording) humming along. The record companies should be restructed into recording-only companies that charge a flat fee for the use of their equipment, a little like a car rental, since that is the only useful service that they provide.
So basic economic theory does hold when the cost and price are zero, and the remedy that it suggests is some free trade in the form of repealing copyright law, since copyright law is what perturbs the market and keeps it from coming to its equilibrium and optimal price of $0.
There is a third solution, charge the students the wholesale (what you pay for it) cost of the bandwidth. The tech fee pays for the baseline tech expenses, and bandwidth is payed via a usage fee.
Although scanning for and blocking viruses might be nice, I do believe it violates the "common carrier" clause of the DMCA, and if you don't scan for viruses (as well as any other scanning), you wouldn't be liable anyway for copyright infringement of your users.
Of course, committing corporate fraud and then using your money to buy overpriced CDs is even less risky. Shoplifting is a quite poor has a pretty poor return/risk ratio, though it beats small-scale copyright infringement.
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True, between driving an urban assault vehicle 5 miles each way to pick up a few dozen grams of plastic is wasteful compared to disposable DVDs (so long as you don't drive 5 miles to the supermarket just to get the DVD), but that's the worst case.
Disposable DVDs have more issues than just the waste of the disc itself. The DVDs come in airtight packaging that must also fit marketing and anti-shoplifting requirements. The packaging probably has more mass than the disc itself. Plastic takes about 2 kilos of oil to make 1 kilo of plastic (the other kilo is burnt for energy). The discs and their packaging must be transported to the store.
Driving 1 mile in a 30mpg car is going to take 1/30 gal or 1/8 l or about 100g of fuel. The disc will need about 1/2 kg to 1 kg of oil in its life cycle. For a 5-10 mile round trip, it's about even in terms of energy efficiency.
However, with a decently laid out city (a road grid instead of cul-de-sacs, denser housing, mixed commercial and residential zoning), there will be enough rental places that most people are within 1/2 mile of the nearest shop. This way they can easily walk there, and there is plenty of competition to keep prices reasonable.
With this system, the disposable DVD becomes quite awful compared to returning the disc in terms of energy use.
This would never float in the US.
1 - There is no lower bound for what is copyright infringement. Copying 3 notes from a song has been found to be infringement.
2 - One of the tests for fair use is does it affect the marketability of the original work. In this case it does, since the kids aren't paying their monopoly dues.
3 - Copyright is horribly in favor of copyright holders in this country (and many others).
Copyright is totalitarian. It uses the force of law to prevent me from doing stuff. It requires active policing (ie., raids and arrests). Getting rid of copyrights (and associated contracts/licenses) don't require this. On top of that, the natural state is for there to be no copyright.
No license that I've seen requires publishing of derivatives, they only require you not to restrict redistribution. In other words, they only require you not to act totalitarian towards the people who got copies from you.
So which one is totalitarian now?
Why do people think Itunes is so great? In terms of money going to the artists, it's almost as bad as buying a CD in the store (11% gross goes to the artist, and we all know how much is left over after all is said and done).
Compound that with files that aren't cleartext mp3 or ogg and I can't pay anonymously with cash (hard to do on the internet), and it's no better than buying a CD.
I guess hell will be a very cold place before I will declare my boycott of the RIAA and its members over.
That it requires a credit card also rules them out, since I'm also boycotting them for various moral and privary reasons.
I think there's also the saturation effect. There's so many harsh laws that you have to prioritize. I don't like either law, but I'm going to fight the Patriot Act that I completely detest before going after a law that I just feel is too harsh, but where I agree with the basic premise of keeping drunks off the road.
"I would like some rice, lentils, water, and sugar." - OK
"I would like some rice, lentils, and some water and sugar." - OK
"I would like the following: rice, lentils, water and sugar." - OK
"I would like some rice, lentils, water and sugar." - WRONG
The first two are quite clear. In the first one, all four items are seperate and I would like four dishes. In the second I would like three dishes, the third consisting of sugar and water.
The third is OK, but when the rule is commonly ignored (like with double negatives), it becomes ambiguous. In this case, the water and sugar are together.
The fourth is ambiguous. Are the sugar and water grouped together?
Actually there is an association between copyright, copyleft, and politics.
Note: I am assuming that having no copyrights includes a ban on any contracts tying the purchase, lease, or acquisition of any information or art to anything else, as EULAs would make the non-existance of copyright a moot point if they are allowed.
Copyrights fly against left-wing ideals of equality and the common good, as copyrights destroy wealth (through their monopoly effects, which prevent supply and demand from meeting at the price of zero) and copyrights take wealth from the masses and concentrate them in the hands of a few rich people.
Copyrights can be either liked or disliked by right wingers, depending on what type they are. On the one hand, the same arguments used in favor of SUVs (that the government should not be telling us what to drive) can be used against copyright (the government shouldn't be telling us what we can't copy). On the other hand, right wingers argue that without copyright, there would be no incentive to create (tell that to the people who've written GNU/Linux).
Personally, I am a left winger and I love copyleft/hate copyright.
To make it more confusing, you have all the people who buy the "starving artist" rhetoric. There's two major points against using copyright to fix this one.
1 - Right now, the money doesn't go to the starving artists. 99% goes to the record company (music). Other branches fare a little better, but not much.
2 - Giving money to the Endowment for the Arts or PBS or NPR (either as private donations or from public monies) would get a lot more bang for the buck, since advertising is a very costly way of funding things and private media companies seem to spend $2 marketing for $1 of production. Not that it would solve the unemployment problem among artists, since art is fun and many people want to do it, even for low pay.
There is also the "copying is theft" argument, which I find idiotic. "Stealing someone's idea", or more precisely "Claiming someone else's idea as your own", is a special form of lying known as plagarism, but how that relates to general copying, I don't know. Copying is neither stealing nor sharing, but something even better, as I will demonstrate.
There are eight kids in a room with a single coloring book. They have three options.
1 - Fight over it. If the book is still in one piece afterwards, the victor gets the book. Not very nice, and half the fun of coloring is having people around anyway.
2 - Share the book. Perhaps a few pages can be torn out for each person, or perhaps the book can be passed around, or perhaps all 8 kids can draw at the same time. Defineately some awkwardness or loss either way it's done, but better than option 1.
3 - Make 8 copies of the book (and store the original just in case). Now everyone can have their own book.
I haven't mentioned the author, since (s)he's not in this scene, in the same way that an architect or laborer has no business interfering with a house they built after selling it.
Private corporations with private armies.
copy-protected (I hate the term DRM)
I don't see how copy-protected is any less double-speak than digital rights management. In fact, I hate copy-protected more, since it can't be easily morphed into the phrase "digital restriction management".
Copy protection would logically refer to stuff like error correction that would ensure that even if the copy process wasn't perfect, the copy could be used. A RAID would be a good example of this. Source code escrow accounts for clients would be another form of copy protection.
My favorite term is crippled, since it is dead-on and it has the proper (negative) connotation.
When calculating the expense of eating out it is important to figure in the when spending an hour or more in the kitchen cooking, you are not making money.
Eating out takes a long time too. You have to get to the place and back, as well as wait for the food to be prepared and eat it. If you're eating fast food, the preparation time would be low, but you still have to get to and from the place.
If you eat in, depending on what you cook, it can take very little time. Pasta takes about 5-10 minutes of time, since you can leave the stove unattended for most of the time. Potatoes, rice, string beans, beans, lentils, and many other foods take a similar amount of time. Fruits take 0 time, since they're usually eaten raw.
Meat would probably take longer (not sure since I never cook and rarely eat meat), but it's not very healthy and it's quite messy to clean up.
Not to mention I'm certain that shushi, food in the raw, low carb, or whatever resturant I'm in the mood for today will do a much better job of creating a well balanced, healthy, and well presented meal than I can.
Most restaurant food is not very healthy, particularly fast food.
As a final note, both your income and restaurant food is taxed (at least in NY). Assuming your marginal tax rate is 30% and the sales tax is 8.75% (NY has a very high sales tax, and restaurants are taxed), a $5 fast food meal would cost you $7.77 in pre-tax income. A dollar saved is worth more than a dollar earned after taking taxes into account.
No, a gravity assist doesn't affect the rotation speed one bit. It only affects the orbital speed (and thus the length of a year).
An outward assist (when the spacecraft is sped up) causes the year to get shorter, and an inward assist (when the spacecraft is slowed down) causes the year to get longer.
The military is about $500B a year. 3x that would be $1.5T a year. There is no way the US federal government is spending $1.5T on education. It's somewhere south of $100B. Local government pays for most education expenses.
Now the total US education spending is substantial (about $400B for K-12 education [primary and secondary school, but not college]), but it's not even as much as we spend on the military, no less 3x that. 4% of GDP on education is by no long shot overspending.
It's not unmetered either. Unmetered means not measured. If you're not measuring usage, that means you have no way to figure out who's using a lot of bandwidth or not.
The proper (but not so effective) term would be metered at no marginal cost.
I had WinME for a few years. POS is a very appropriate term for it.
On the plus side, I finally got tired and installed Mandrake 9.1 on my machine (as the only OS on the machine) about 6 months ago.
Man, is that a strawman if I ever did see one.
I fully agree. Copyright and patent law should be repealed, to be replaced by an anti-plagarism law. I'm going to throw in trade secrets and (partially) trademarks too.
Not only is copyright unnatural, but it flies in the face of most moral codes (sharing is good, people should help others, etc), it is horribly inefficient from an economic standpoint, and is horribly unjust from a socialist standpoint, and it is horrible from a civil liberties standpoint for multiple reasons.
Copyright is unnatural:
- Common sense says that what I do privately is noone else's business.
Copyright is immoral:
- Depends on your belief system, but if it includes things like "sharing is good" or "do onto others as you would want them to do onto you", then copyright runs flatly against it. For the do onto others idea, it is in almost everyone's personal interest not to respect copyright and not to have their copyright's respected in exchange. Do onto others cuts both ways. If you get a great benefit for a small pain to someone else, it's OK under that system, just so long as you allow others to do the same.
- Plagarism is another story and most moral codes are strongly against it, since it is lying.
Copyright is horribly inefficient economically:
- Copyright is an absolute monopoly. Under a monopoly, a profit-maximizing company will price the product far higher than the socially optimum and 'free-market' price. In the case of copyrighted material, this is often a factor of 10-1 to 1,000-1 in price. While some money is transferred from buyer to monopoly, a lot of value is lost in the process too, as any ECON101 course will teach you.
- Collecting payment is costly. On top of the monopoly losses, selling CDs, as opposed to giving them away, costs quite a bit in billing (credit card, cashier, insurance, etc) and handling (theft prevention, since $20 CDs are worth stealing, but $.20 ones are not). This probably amounts to a dollar or two per CD bought. Preventing counterfitting also costs resources, both for the seller for the prevention measures, and for society at large because of the restrictions that they must put up with.
Copyright is horribly unjust from a socialist point of view:
- Copyrights move money from the poor and middle-class to the rich. Most spending on copyrighted items are from poor and lower middle class people, who spend a large share of their income on advertisments (not literally, but ads distort people's buying senses and cause people to overconsume), cable TV, music, movies, books, and software.
- Copyrights lends itself to vertically intergrated media companies (the same company controls distribution and creation). This allows the big companies to deny independant creators from being distributed, and independant distributors from having anything to distribute. Abolishing copyright would allow independant distributers (ie., P2P) to compete on equal terms, and it would make the expense of an integrated company prohibitive. The social ill of integrated companies is that they have the power to shape the news and social norms via the content they commission.
- Copyright lowers the standard of living for poor and middle-class people. Anything that lowers the standard of living without a good reason is unjust.
Copyright is horribly against civil liberties:
- Copyright infringes on a basic freedom - the freedom to do anything that doesn't effect the environment or harm others. Being harmed and loosing out on ill-gotten profits are very different, and it usally boils down to common sense.
- Copyright allows for supression of news and bending of culture, because it lends itself towards media comglomerates.
Patents are also bad for many of the same reasons, especially the economic ones, and should be abolished as well.
Trademarks are overly powerful, but because they serve a useful purpose (linking a manufacturer to a product), they should be merely reigned in. To serve this end and only this end, 'trademark dilution' sh
Even better would be open-source hardware. Although you wouldn't be able to 'compile' your chip layouts at home, any manufacturer or government could make them, and anyone could write drivers for them.
If open-source hardware even became competitive in performance to closed-source hardware, the cheaper price and the (hopefully) standardized interfaces will eat the lunch of the closed-source hardware.
And if you sneeze in my face and don't cover your mouth, I'll be angry.
Just like you should cover your mouth and turn away to sneeze, you should try to get into an empty room, or at least talk at a low level and keep it brief if you can't.
The plural of mouse is mice, as in the phrase "Three cute mice live in my wall."
They is probably an attempt to kill Linux and the GPL. Even if the fee is 1 cent per copy, the fact that any patent restriction exists means that GPL code implementing FAT can't be destributed.
.000000001 cents so that it doesn't look too obvious.
Microsoft probably settled on 25 cents instead of
That aside, I've been using FAT since I was a kid. My first computer in 1990 used FAT, so how are they getting a patent in 1995 on it?
It's just a set of pointers to their artwork. There is nothing in that map file that they made, or if there is, it's a poor map file design.
No, put a strong enough barrier around any charged partible and tunneling will stop (most of the time).
Alpha particles in gold seem to stay put even over geological time scales without tunneling the femtometre to freedom (about 10^-15 m). That is because the strong nuclear force holding them in has a very high potential, as well as the greater momentum of an alpha particle (which reduces the heisenburg effect, but not enough to fully explain for the lack of tunneling)
The problem is applying a strong field on an electron in a gate. If we could get a 1MV potential into the gate, we'd have no problem, but we can't, so that's our problem. Diamond won't help us much, if at all, in that respect.
Yes, economics do work when zero is in the denominator, and they don't paint a pretty picture for the music industry.
Let's go through core numbers for the capitalist model (the one they teach you in school), which is that maximum efficiency is when marginal price (MP) equals marginal cost (MC).
MP=MC occurs when price = $0, since marginal cost is $0.
What this means is that the music industry is most efficient for our country at price = $0. Unlike most other goods, having a gluttonous appetite for music doesn't cost our society any resources, be they labor or raw materials.
This does leave the issue of paying for the capital costs (recording the original songs), which must be paid somehow. Forturnately, they're small, and fame, non-CD revenues (concerts), and the fact that many musicians aren't in it for the money will keep capital production (ie., song writing and recording) humming along. The record companies should be restructed into recording-only companies that charge a flat fee for the use of their equipment, a little like a car rental, since that is the only useful service that they provide.
So basic economic theory does hold when the cost and price are zero, and the remedy that it suggests is some free trade in the form of repealing copyright law, since copyright law is what perturbs the market and keeps it from coming to its equilibrium and optimal price of $0.
There is a third solution, charge the students the wholesale (what you pay for it) cost of the bandwidth. The tech fee pays for the baseline tech expenses, and bandwidth is payed via a usage fee.
Although scanning for and blocking viruses might be nice, I do believe it violates the "common carrier" clause of the DMCA, and if you don't scan for viruses (as well as any other scanning), you wouldn't be liable anyway for copyright infringement of your users.
Of course, committing corporate fraud and then using your money to buy overpriced CDs is even less risky. Shoplifting is a quite poor has a pretty poor return/risk ratio, though it beats small-scale copyright infringement.