I'd argue first that it's not a right GRANTED by copyright law, but a right RECOGNIZED. Sadly, that's not a popular interpretation of the constitution these days.
Second, if you are collateral damage, look who else is. IF DRM affects people's choice of hardware, it will impact such persons as the artritic who wants primarily to choose a device that has easy to press buttons, but has to consider the playback compatability issue first. It will affect the dedicated hiker who wants to carry the lightest gear on a 20 mile trek more than it will the couch potato. It will affect a great many of the disabled, and not just a few like the kid and his mom in my exanple. It will impact people who like a performer enough to seek out recordings of their early work whatever medium they are recorded on, more than the casual fan who listens only to whatever is tops of the charts at the moment.
What better definition of a bad law is there, than one that selectively targets both some of the best asperations of men and the weak and downtrodden?
But a result like this shows just why we didn't need the Superconducting Supercollider...
At the time the SS was proposed, we didn't see a lot of flaws in the standard theory. The SS couldn't reach energies needed to prove such predictions as Weak and Strong force unification, and so the best prediction was it wouldn't confirm the existing theories, and would only give important data if there was a flaw in them, and that flaw happened to be one that would manefest in the relatively tiny additional range where the SS would produce data. Ergo, it was a bad idea, in the sense of betting against long odds.
Of course, now that we have found a flaw in the range our engineering can reach, NOW we may have a reason to build some new instruments. Let's hope we can both figure out what they are and afford them.
Maybe.
Then there's Greg Bear's book Blood Music (the novel). Among many other things, it's a popularization of the idea that the universe actually changes the rules to avoid being pinned down too closely by observation.
If you want to see something of the actual science behind that SF, you could Google for Andrew Edward Dizon, Ph.D., John Graves, Ph.D., and Information Mechanics.
They had to pick alternates that started with "t" and "b", so they didn't have to redraw all the feynmann diagrams. At least it's not "Tux" and "Bill".
Thasnks for presenting that arguement so elloquently. I get very tired of seeing definitions of faith, particularly here on/., that treat it as arbitrary or in defiance of evidence. I've seen a lot of defenses of evolution that address the mistake of treating it as driven by just random chance (as a lot of 'creation science" admittedly does). It still surprises me how few non-theists realize that the same sort of straw man arguement exists in a lot of their criticisms of faith.
The first rule of European Opinions on the USA is you do not ask Europeans for their opinions on the USA.
You know they'll tell us anyway, don't you? Just like we keep telling them what we think of everything from keeping figurehead royalty around to what shape a football should be.
I tend to agree, and in fact I'm not real thrilled with some cases where the written law did bend over backwards to take in the rare exception, as juries and such are supposed to already have some ways to do that.
With that said, though, I'd like to point out that even common exceptions often don't affect the law or the opinions of the average person. Would the federal government have hesitated to go after the doctors involved in Califoria's medical marajuana program if it was even more widespread? There were tens of thousands of people directly involved in that particular exception, and the fact that a whole large state government disagreed with federal law doesn't seem to have had much impact on peoples opinions elsewhere.
Let's hope that fixingf the problems with DRM doesn't take getting 280 million US citizens all interested enough to have an opinion, let alone share a common one.
I know a woman who is raising an autistic kid. The child likes to watch video tapes by finding a favorite part of the tape, and then replaying the 30 second sound or image that has caught his attention 100 times or more, with the volume cranked up, up, up. Her comment on this is, "I can leave the room to do the dishes, and I know when he stops standing right in front of the VCR. It's worth putting up with the noise if he stops hitting himself."
Ths child can't speak and took five years to toilet train, and may sometimes forget to eat if not occasionally force fed, but every DVD has to be locked away or he finds them, and usually scratches them.
The DVD player has to be locked away when not used for copying because he knows how to hook it up and use it if not. They tried just pulling the cables and locking them up, but the first time they left daddy's den unlocked, he took some off of daddy's PC speakers and figured out where they went.
Sometimes he bashes the hell out of a VCR, or eats the buttons. Other times he somehow manages to get one he broke running again. Let him loose with a screwdriver (closely watched), and he may attempt to take the electrical outlets apart and possibly lick them, or he may repair some fan or alarm clock, or try to jimmy a lock with it.
Unfortunately, it isn't safe to leave him unattended dissassembling and repairing an old washing machine motor over and over, as, although he may do it for an hour or two, sometimes he gets a new idea, and it usually involves the cat.
Since this child is not blind, he does not constitute a special case in copyright law. When his mother makes five or ten back ups of a DVD he really likes and lets him wear them out at the rate of 1 every few days, she is probably breaking some law or other. In rigging a way to copy a DRMed DVD to tape, she may be breaking more. Now what would you recommend the law do in this case?
This is like upgrading a 911 dispatch system using anti-terrorism funds. It's probably going to improve 911 response - which is a good thing, right? Then again, it may not actually affect terrorism, the location where it's spent may be in very little danger of a terrorist attack anyway, and there may be other places or systems where that same money could do a lot more to actually fight terrorism.
That's the problem here. If the school couldn't get the funds for painting and carpeting, then its because someone decided the funds were needed elsewhere more, or the greater system just doesn't have the funds. That someone is likely to be elected, or at least supervised pretty directly by someone elected, so if those decisions are bad enough, the public can start taking an interest in getting people into those jobs that will do better. Shuffling funds around in such ways just makes it harder for the public to take proper control of their government. When people get used to using trickery and sneaking about to accomplish a decent goal, the sneaks whose goals are to line their own pockets flourish undetected.
My state had until recently a very unenforced law against Adultery on the books. In the last few years, there were two civil divorce cases where it became clear that the husband was not the biological father of the children, but the mother refused to name who was in court. In at least one of the cases, it became prety obvious that the woman was naming various people she didn't like and thus forcing them to undergo court ordered paternity tests at their own expense, and was still shielding the biological father. The judges in these cases used the threat of that old law to break this legal strategy.
I'm not thrilled with this. It seems like a shame that contempt of court charges were not used instead, for one thing. However, I like the fact that, in this state, a legal father can at least sue to recover his court ordered child support from that biological father. There are some states where this is considered irrelevant.
Now that state law against adultery was quite possibly not constitutional, as measured by the state's own bill of rights, let alone the federal one, and is dropped from the new revision. State sodomy laws here have already been shot down on multiple grounds, including privacy rights that are explicit in our state's constitution rather than implicit as in the federal one.
However, some of these laws do appear to have valid uses. I can't think of any offhand for the sodomy statutes unless you consider randomly harrassing homosexuals to be a good thing, but the hate speech laws may have some rather sensible uses. Perhaps they are serving as a shortcut in the law, i.e. the persons committing the speech in actual cases under prosecution may be commercial entities. There is generally less legal protection for commercial speech, and it is often easier to prove such crimes as libel or fraud. Perhaps some of these hate speech laws are designed to get around having to laborously prove that a commercial entitty IS a commercial entity, if this has been a common delaying tactic.
Getting rid of such laws still leaves the society needing a way to deal with that underlieing problem that inspired the law. I don't just mean that finding a hate speech law unconstitutional may leave us needing to deal with racism in some other way, but that it may make it hard for the court to afford to prosecute what should be valid laws, or to avoid being manipulated in some way that is against the real interests of justice.
Anyone who's eaten MRE's will tell you that MRE really stands for something totally unprintable. I was in the basic training class that tested the original dehydrated pork patty meal, which was one that was dropped from the final mix. If you think the ones in use today are bad, you should see the rejects. To be fair, the "passed through a Canadian reactor ham brick on two thick crackers" meal is pretty good, and the noodles and chicken in sauce is fine if you have time to use a heater. We can hope the astronauts won't be too pressed for time to cook properly. That and stay completely away from the various forms of "pound cake" (Sawdust flavored, sawdust flavored with chocolate chips, sawdust and banana bits, sawdust and cinamon spice, etc.).
And here I was, thinking, "Yeah, if you go back far enough, most of us have had some experience with boobies of some size or other." - or was the OP a bottle baby?
At Yalta, Stalin negotiated a deal with the US and Britain, wherein the USSR had a period after the war with Germany ended, before the USSR was supposed to get involved in the war with Japan. That time was supposed to be needed for absolutely critical rebuilding of the Russian Heartland after what the Germans had done to it. The US didn't know that Stalin was already aware of the progress in the development of the A-bomb, and perhaps didn't look hard enough for ulterior motives. The USSR was therefore able to jump into the pacific war at the very end, while simultaneously claiming they were more than fufilling their promises and not incurring any real costs.
OK, but as long as they use the word socialist, we can push people's buttons over here with that. The ones who knee jerk on the word socialist will assume they are "radical marxists", or even worse, "liberals". Heck, we've even got the word "union" in there too, how pinko can you get?
Tell some other people the party is on the right, and we can mention in passing another right wing German bunch that used the word socialist in their name too.
With the right spin, this is a gold mine of good publicity for Linux. Can I use that quote about the abhorrent positions? What's the biggest thing the CSU supports that most Politically Active Christians over here will find abhorent? Forced Bussing of Christian baby seals to live with Agnostic Baby Orcas? Manditory 100% taxation on all profits from the sale of propane and propane accessories? We don't need the things many over here would find "reasonable" mind you, if they've supported the US in Iraq or something leave that out.
Just think of all those people who will be able to add Open Office and Linux familiarity to their resumes. Will they be able to negotiate raises based on their exceptional proficiency? Munich is taking a small gamble that the rate at which other organizations adopt Linux won't greatly impact their hiring and employee comp. I say small, because it's generally likely that other orgs migrating to Linux will find it more efficient to train existing personnel and hire locally than offer a salary that will draw people from other areas, but it should be remembered, that's not always the way it works.
For example, in the past we've seen a fairtly sizeable number of people move up the economic ladder from their MCSE's by getting rarer certifications such as CNAs and there being an expectation those are worth a certain amount near automatically. If you've ever been advised to get training in something because it's currently rare, that's proceeding from the same assumption.
Companies, and (particularly) Governments, are often reluctant to publicly discuss this potential cost of switching. Remembering it is often there, often undiscussed, helps explain why some are reluctant to switch. Germany has shown a tendency to equate high pay and benifits with resulting high productivity, and expect such costs to be moderate to trivial. They're probably right, but lots of the world doesn't really trust that assumption, hence the hesitation.
Obviously, my 'idiology" disagrees with yours. I note you do not provide any alternative interpretation of the phrase as it is actually found in the constitution. If it doesn't describe a quid-pro-quo, and if the rights in question are not derived from a Jeffersonian model of natural law, what is the relationship, and which founding father's letters do you want to pull out to derive the 'real' intent of that phrase in the constitution. If the constitution is not describing a transfer of what would otherwise be a natural right of the people, what is it describing, a manufacture of a right ex nihilo by the government?
Earlier copyrith revisions have allowed a grace period, for people to register works affected by the change. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that the supreme court can sketch out a procedure like this in their decision as part of a possible solution, and congress can take such advice into account in either writing a wholely new law or amending the 1976 version. Earlier grace periods were as little as 6 months or a year, although I suspect that IP industry types would swiftly realize they should at least lobby for 5 years or so and hope for 2 this time.
An author has absolutely no right to try to supress a work once it's published. Copyright's a quid pro quo deal, and he got the quid. The public protected his work from anyone else using it for profit, he made whatever money he was able to make off of it, and the payback is that the work goes on to enrich the public (or under current law, the public's great grandchildren). Any author taking steps to make a published work less likely to contribute to what the US constitution calls progress in the useful arts (particularly by surviveing until it enters the public domain, but also by being used as an inspiration or source for other works and for public discourse), is just as dishonest as a those shady building contractors who get paid all the fees for building a house up front and then keep rescheduling other jobs ahead of it.
Making a loud noise at 2 AM in a residential neighbourhood isn't illegal because of content. At least in theory, the noise could be "Vote for Kerry", or "Vote for Bush" or even The Monkees singing Daydream Believer, Nielsen's 5th Symphony, or "BLAAARRRTTT!!!". Spam's the same way. Just deliberately misspelling words to evade filters shows that the spammer is aware their actions are harrassment, and not a free speech issue at all. The court's long standing decisions on the limits of commercial speech mean that someone who wants to sell you "Herbal Viagra" has even fewer rights involved than someone who wants to influence your vote.
Just to clarify, U. S. light armor isn't HUMVEEs, it's mostly Bradley APCs and the occsional modified M-113 still in the system. The Bradley is treated as both an Infantry vehicle and a Cavalry scout vehicle, so you may see it refered to as an APC (armored personnel carrier) or an IFV (Infantry fighting vehicle), while the old M-113 chassis is still used for some communications and ambulance/field hospital vehicles and possibly still by MP units. You might also include M-88 tank recovery vehicles since they are modified from what was heavy armor in the WWW2 era, but isn't really up to grade now. Arguably, even some artillery systems, i.e. Palladin howitzers, can count as light armor if in a direct fire environment. All of these have tracks, not tires. There's also a few vehicles used by the U. S. Marines which fill roughly simiar roles, but include some amphibious capabilities.
Just think about all the non-criminal actions that people don't want made public. Imagine you're 35, and still read comics or watch cartoons or play with legos. (This shouldn't be too hard for most slashdotters). Do you really want to have to justify your hobby to just anyone? Cops are trained to be suspicious. What happens if they see you buying comics, and they're looking for a paedophile? Those comics could be bait, right? Now you're on a list.
Or you buy liquor, and one of those retired cops or students watching you goes to the same temperance beliving church, and somehow word gets around.
Or you break a law, but it's one that is either trivial or generally not enforced. For example, in my locale, there's a running track adjacent to a civic center. The whole facility closes at 9:00 PM on weekends, so technically, people aren't supposed to be out there walking after 9:00 PM, but the police will pragmatically warn people that it's simply something they do at their own risk. Most people know that that city ordenance is there to protect the city against lawsuits rather than to be rigorously applied. With public cameras, does the society end up with a zero-tolerance policy for jay-walking? And is it a good thing to be able to boast "We may not have solved all the murders that we had last year, but we have 100% convictions on jay-walking.".
Like I said, its an obviously false assumption that most viewers of a TV show can afford a particular product. The point was, if you treat it as true just for the sake of arguement, then the "average" consumer has a much higher income, and so the value of their time would be a lot more. (Say they earn 30$ an hour on average, their time is worth 50 cents/minute, so watching eight minutes of commercials to get a program works out to them thinking the program was worth about 4$, and by that rule, 8$ for a two hour movie ticket or 16 dollars for a CD they will listen to twice should be about right, and 16 dollars for a DVD they, and their spouse and two kids will watch three times becomes a real bargain.).
I didn't mention whether anyone in the RIAA or MPAA is reasoning from this false assumption, but there is a quote I've seen from Jack Valetti, that reads (very approximately, from memory ). "Those little guys, they only make 100,000$ a year. That's not much to live on.", so it sounds like some industry people might be.
The real reason the assumption is false is, when consumers estimate prices and values, they simply don't think of it like "I can't afford to buy one of those, so I'm freeloading on the system by watching the program this commercial pays for", so they think their income should be irrelevant to the company. Rather they think more in terms of "The company that advertised got its fair reward, whether it came from me or some other viewer" or "The company chose to advertise here - no one was pointing a gun at their head to make them do it. No one is pointing a gun at my head to make me watch." Then they decide that their income may be irrelevant to the advertiser, but it is still very relevant to themselves. Consumers don't haver much respect for an industry that doesn't want to admit that either of those last two quotes are valid, and less if some industry flack starts claiming the first quotes are true instead. If someone tells you that you are stealing just by getting up during the commercials and going to the bathroom, why should you believe them when they say you are stealing by downloading software or MP3s?
The original point about free software stems from the same clash of viewpoints. The downloaders don't view it as free, because they paid something to an ISP to get on the net, and they are paying in time and effort to find content, sit there twiddleing their thumbs while it downloads, and to burn it to a blank CD they also paid for. Often they have bought video capture cards, memory, or faster systems to get access to broadband. What did anyone expect them to do with a cable modem except download more and faster to get their extra 30$ a month use out of it? That often looks like about the same value as they pay for other entertainment, and the fact that none of it goes to the content producer is "not their fault".
I didn't go into some tangental assumptions in what was already a lengthy post.
In terms of what is only a "percieved" price instead of a real market derived one, it's probably fair to not include "station identification", commercials for other programs coming up (that's perceived as a cost the station has to help it sell commercials to someone else, and argueably many viewers are thinking from the assumption that a broadcasting corporation makes no money airing its own program ads, which is almost but not quite invariably true).
It also seems fair to me not to include "Public Service" announcements, and possibly even those commercials that fall between two blocks of programming, but you might want to refigure for all that and get a ratio more like 13 minutes of ads, 47 minutes of show.
Remember too the viewer often skips some commercials as well. Very few (if any) people think of it in terms of, "I took a bathroom break and made a sandwich, lets see, I guess I have to miss the last 9 minutes of this show, or watch a few extra commercials."
Sorry, but in the interests of keeping it simple, I didn't bother to specify nearly all the conditions that might shove the actual price estimates a bit one way or the other.
I think it's interesting that we could start from a lot of obviously false assumptions that would drive the estimates way up and still not see any matches between these price estimates and actual prices, costs or values. For example, we could make an assumption that people are equally likely to change channels during ads or programs, or one that assumes most advertisers are marketing a product that most viewers of a particular program can afford (Like if we assume that 90% of the watchers of Friends can afford an SUV, since some are advertised there), and then do this analysis for that particular program, and the percieved prices still come out very wonky.
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I'd argue first that it's not a right GRANTED by copyright law, but a right RECOGNIZED. Sadly, that's not a popular interpretation of the constitution these days.
Second, if you are collateral damage, look who else is. IF DRM affects people's choice of hardware, it will impact such persons as the artritic who wants primarily to choose a device that has easy to press buttons, but has to consider the playback compatability issue first. It will affect the dedicated hiker who wants to carry the lightest gear on a 20 mile trek more than it will the couch potato. It will affect a great many of the disabled, and not just a few like the kid and his mom in my exanple. It will impact people who like a performer enough to seek out recordings of their early work whatever medium they are recorded on, more than the casual fan who listens only to whatever is tops of the charts at the moment.
What better definition of a bad law is there, than one that selectively targets both some of the best asperations of men and the weak and downtrodden?
But a result like this shows just why we didn't need the Superconducting Supercollider...
At the time the SS was proposed, we didn't see a lot of flaws in the standard theory. The SS couldn't reach energies needed to prove such predictions as Weak and Strong force unification, and so the best prediction was it wouldn't confirm the existing theories, and would only give important data if there was a flaw in them, and that flaw happened to be one that would manefest in the relatively tiny additional range where the SS would produce data. Ergo, it was a bad idea, in the sense of betting against long odds.
Of course, now that we have found a flaw in the range our engineering can reach, NOW we may have a reason to build some new instruments. Let's hope we can both figure out what they are and afford them.
Maybe.
Then there's Greg Bear's book Blood Music (the novel). Among many other things, it's a popularization of the idea that the universe actually changes the rules to avoid being pinned down too closely by observation.
If you want to see something of the actual science behind that SF, you could Google for Andrew Edward Dizon, Ph.D., John Graves, Ph.D., and Information Mechanics.
They had to pick alternates that started with "t" and "b", so they didn't have to redraw all the feynmann diagrams. At least it's not "Tux" and "Bill".
Thasnks for presenting that arguement so elloquently. I get very tired of seeing definitions of faith, particularly here on /., that treat it as arbitrary or in defiance of evidence. I've seen a lot of defenses of evolution that address the mistake of treating it as driven by just random chance (as a lot of 'creation science" admittedly does). It still surprises me how few non-theists realize that the same sort of straw man arguement exists in a lot of their criticisms of faith.
The first rule of European Opinions on the USA is you do not ask Europeans for their opinions on the USA.
You know they'll tell us anyway, don't you? Just like we keep telling them what we think of everything from keeping figurehead royalty around to what shape a football should be.
FreeBSD le morte!
I tend to agree, and in fact I'm not real thrilled with some cases where the written law did bend over backwards to take in the rare exception, as juries and such are supposed to already have some ways to do that.
With that said, though, I'd like to point out that even common exceptions often don't affect the law or the opinions of the average person. Would the federal government have hesitated to go after the doctors involved in Califoria's medical marajuana program if it was even more widespread? There were tens of thousands of people directly involved in that particular exception, and the fact that a whole large state government disagreed with federal law doesn't seem to have had much impact on peoples opinions elsewhere.
Let's hope that fixingf the problems with DRM doesn't take getting 280 million US citizens all interested enough to have an opinion, let alone share a common one.
I know a woman who is raising an autistic kid. The child likes to watch video tapes by finding a favorite part of the tape, and then replaying the 30 second sound or image that has caught his attention 100 times or more, with the volume cranked up, up, up. Her comment on this is, "I can leave the room to do the dishes, and I know when he stops standing right in front of the VCR. It's worth putting up with the noise if he stops hitting himself."
Ths child can't speak and took five years to toilet train, and may sometimes forget to eat if not occasionally force fed, but every DVD has to be locked away or he finds them, and usually scratches them.
The DVD player has to be locked away when not used for copying because he knows how to hook it up and use it if not. They tried just pulling the cables and locking them up, but the first time they left daddy's den unlocked, he took some off of daddy's PC speakers and figured out where they went.
Sometimes he bashes the hell out of a VCR, or eats the buttons. Other times he somehow manages to get one he broke running again. Let him loose with a screwdriver (closely watched), and he may attempt to take the electrical outlets apart and possibly lick them, or he may repair some fan or alarm clock, or try to jimmy a lock with it.
Unfortunately, it isn't safe to leave him unattended dissassembling and repairing an old washing machine motor over and over, as, although he may do it for an hour or two, sometimes he gets a new idea, and it usually involves the cat.
Since this child is not blind, he does not constitute a special case in copyright law. When his mother makes five or ten back ups of a DVD he really likes and lets him wear them out at the rate of 1 every few days, she is probably breaking some law or other. In rigging a way to copy a DRMed DVD to tape, she may be breaking more. Now what would you recommend the law do in this case?
This is like upgrading a 911 dispatch system using anti-terrorism funds. It's probably going to improve 911 response - which is a good thing, right? Then again, it may not actually affect terrorism, the location where it's spent may be in very little danger of a terrorist attack anyway, and there may be other places or systems where that same money could do a lot more to actually fight terrorism.
That's the problem here. If the school couldn't get the funds for painting and carpeting, then its because someone decided the funds were needed elsewhere more, or the greater system just doesn't have the funds. That someone is likely to be elected, or at least supervised pretty directly by someone elected, so if those decisions are bad enough, the public can start taking an interest in getting people into those jobs that will do better. Shuffling funds around in such ways just makes it harder for the public to take proper control of their government. When people get used to using trickery and sneaking about to accomplish a decent goal, the sneaks whose goals are to line their own pockets flourish undetected.
My state had until recently a very unenforced law against Adultery on the books. In the last few years, there were two civil divorce cases where it became clear that the husband was not the biological father of the children, but the mother refused to name who was in court. In at least one of the cases, it became prety obvious that the woman was naming various people she didn't like and thus forcing them to undergo court ordered paternity tests at their own expense, and was still shielding the biological father. The judges in these cases used the threat of that old law to break this legal strategy.
I'm not thrilled with this. It seems like a shame that contempt of court charges were not used instead, for one thing. However, I like the fact that, in this state, a legal father can at least sue to recover his court ordered child support from that biological father. There are some states where this is considered irrelevant.
Now that state law against adultery was quite possibly not constitutional, as measured by the state's own bill of rights, let alone the federal one, and is dropped from the new revision. State sodomy laws here have already been shot down on multiple grounds, including privacy rights that are explicit in our state's constitution rather than implicit as in the federal one.
However, some of these laws do appear to have valid uses. I can't think of any offhand for the sodomy statutes unless you consider randomly harrassing homosexuals to be a good thing, but the hate speech laws may have some rather sensible uses. Perhaps they are serving as a shortcut in the law, i.e. the persons committing the speech in actual cases under prosecution may be commercial entities. There is generally less legal protection for commercial speech, and it is often easier to prove such crimes as libel or fraud. Perhaps some of these hate speech laws are designed to get around having to laborously prove that a commercial entitty IS a commercial entity, if this has been a common delaying tactic.
Getting rid of such laws still leaves the society needing a way to deal with that underlieing problem that inspired the law. I don't just mean that finding a hate speech law unconstitutional may leave us needing to deal with racism in some other way, but that it may make it hard for the court to afford to prosecute what should be valid laws, or to avoid being manipulated in some way that is against the real interests of justice.
Anyone who's eaten MRE's will tell you that MRE really stands for something totally unprintable. I was in the basic training class that tested the original dehydrated pork patty meal, which was one that was dropped from the final mix. If you think the ones in use today are bad, you should see the rejects. To be fair, the "passed through a Canadian reactor ham brick on two thick crackers" meal is pretty good, and the noodles and chicken in sauce is fine if you have time to use a heater. We can hope the astronauts won't be too pressed for time to cook properly. That and stay completely away from the various forms of "pound cake" (Sawdust flavored, sawdust flavored with chocolate chips, sawdust and banana bits, sawdust and cinamon spice, etc.).
Is their any chance the SPD will endorse Microsoft?
And here I was, thinking, "Yeah, if you go back far enough, most of us have had some experience with boobies of some size or other." - or was the OP a bottle baby?
At Yalta, Stalin negotiated a deal with the US and Britain, wherein the USSR had a period after the war with Germany ended, before the USSR was supposed to get involved in the war with Japan. That time was supposed to be needed for absolutely critical rebuilding of the Russian Heartland after what the Germans had done to it. The US didn't know that Stalin was already aware of the progress in the development of the A-bomb, and perhaps didn't look hard enough for ulterior motives. The USSR was therefore able to jump into the pacific war at the very end, while simultaneously claiming they were more than fufilling their promises and not incurring any real costs.
OK, but as long as they use the word socialist, we can push people's buttons over here with that. The ones who knee jerk on the word socialist will assume they are "radical marxists", or even worse, "liberals". Heck, we've even got the word "union" in there too, how pinko can you get?
Tell some other people the party is on the right, and we can mention in passing another right wing German bunch that used the word socialist in their name too.
With the right spin, this is a gold mine of good publicity for Linux. Can I use that quote about the abhorrent positions? What's the biggest thing the CSU supports that most Politically Active Christians over here will find abhorent? Forced Bussing of Christian baby seals to live with Agnostic Baby Orcas? Manditory 100% taxation on all profits from the sale of propane and propane accessories? We don't need the things many over here would find "reasonable" mind you, if they've supported the US in Iraq or something leave that out.
Just think of all those people who will be able to add Open Office and Linux familiarity to their resumes. Will they be able to negotiate raises based on their exceptional proficiency? Munich is taking a small gamble that the rate at which other organizations adopt Linux won't greatly impact their hiring and employee comp. I say small, because it's generally likely that other orgs migrating to Linux will find it more efficient to train existing personnel and hire locally than offer a salary that will draw people from other areas, but it should be remembered, that's not always the way it works.
For example, in the past we've seen a fairtly sizeable number of people move up the economic ladder from their MCSE's by getting rarer certifications such as CNAs and there being an expectation those are worth a certain amount near automatically. If you've ever been advised to get training in something because it's currently rare, that's proceeding from the same assumption.
Companies, and (particularly) Governments, are often reluctant to publicly discuss this potential cost of switching. Remembering it is often there, often undiscussed, helps explain why some are reluctant to switch. Germany has shown a tendency to equate high pay and benifits with resulting high productivity, and expect such costs to be moderate to trivial. They're probably right, but lots of the world doesn't really trust that assumption, hence the hesitation.
Obviously, my 'idiology" disagrees with yours. I note you do not provide any alternative interpretation of the phrase as it is actually found in the constitution. If it doesn't describe a quid-pro-quo, and if the rights in question are not derived from a Jeffersonian model of natural law, what is the relationship, and which founding father's letters do you want to pull out to derive the 'real' intent of that phrase in the constitution. If the constitution is not describing a transfer of what would otherwise be a natural right of the people, what is it describing, a manufacture of a right ex nihilo by the government?
Earlier copyrith revisions have allowed a grace period, for people to register works affected by the change. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that the supreme court can sketch out a procedure like this in their decision as part of a possible solution, and congress can take such advice into account in either writing a wholely new law or amending the 1976 version. Earlier grace periods were as little as 6 months or a year, although I suspect that IP industry types would swiftly realize they should at least lobby for 5 years or so and hope for 2 this time.
An author has absolutely no right to try to supress a work once it's published. Copyright's a quid pro quo deal, and he got the quid. The public protected his work from anyone else using it for profit, he made whatever money he was able to make off of it, and the payback is that the work goes on to enrich the public (or under current law, the public's great grandchildren). Any author taking steps to make a published work less likely to contribute to what the US constitution calls progress in the useful arts (particularly by surviveing until it enters the public domain, but also by being used as an inspiration or source for other works and for public discourse), is just as dishonest as a those shady building contractors who get paid all the fees for building a house up front and then keep rescheduling other jobs ahead of it.
Making a loud noise at 2 AM in a residential neighbourhood isn't illegal because of content. At least in theory, the noise could be "Vote for Kerry", or "Vote for Bush" or even The Monkees singing Daydream Believer, Nielsen's 5th Symphony, or "BLAAARRRTTT!!!".
Spam's the same way. Just deliberately misspelling words to evade filters shows that the spammer is aware their actions are harrassment, and not a free speech issue at all. The court's long standing decisions on the limits of commercial speech mean that someone who wants to sell you "Herbal Viagra" has even fewer rights involved than someone who wants to influence your vote.
Just to clarify, U. S. light armor isn't HUMVEEs, it's mostly Bradley APCs and the occsional modified M-113 still in the system. The Bradley is treated as both an Infantry vehicle and a Cavalry scout vehicle, so you may see it refered to as an APC (armored personnel carrier) or an IFV (Infantry fighting vehicle), while the old M-113 chassis is still used for some communications and ambulance/field hospital vehicles and possibly still by MP units. You might also include M-88 tank recovery vehicles since they are modified from what was heavy armor in the WWW2 era, but isn't really up to grade now. Arguably, even some artillery systems, i.e. Palladin howitzers, can count as light armor if in a direct fire environment. All of these have tracks, not tires. There's also a few vehicles used by the U. S. Marines which fill roughly simiar roles, but include some amphibious capabilities.
Just think about all the non-criminal actions that people don't want made public. Imagine you're 35, and still read comics or watch cartoons or play with legos. (This shouldn't be too hard for most slashdotters). Do you really want to have to justify your hobby to just anyone? Cops are trained to be suspicious. What happens if they see you buying comics, and they're looking for a paedophile? Those comics could be bait, right? Now you're on a list.
Or you buy liquor, and one of those retired cops or students watching you goes to the same temperance beliving church, and somehow word gets around.
Or you break a law, but it's one that is either trivial or generally not enforced. For example, in my locale, there's a running track adjacent to a civic center. The whole facility closes at 9:00 PM on weekends, so technically, people aren't supposed to be out there walking after 9:00 PM, but the police will pragmatically warn people that it's simply something they do at their own risk. Most people know that that city ordenance is there to protect the city against lawsuits rather than to be rigorously applied. With public cameras, does the society end up with a zero-tolerance policy for jay-walking? And is it a good thing to be able to boast "We may not have solved all the murders that we had last year, but we have 100% convictions on jay-walking.".
Like I said, its an obviously false assumption that most viewers of a TV show can afford a particular product. The point was, if you treat it as true just for the sake of arguement, then the "average" consumer has a much higher income, and so the value of their time would be a lot more. (Say they earn 30$ an hour on average, their time is worth 50 cents/minute, so watching eight minutes of commercials to get a program works out to them thinking the program was worth about 4$, and by that rule, 8$ for a two hour movie ticket or 16 dollars for a CD they will listen to twice should be about right, and 16 dollars for a DVD they, and their spouse and two kids will watch three times becomes a real bargain.).
I didn't mention whether anyone in the RIAA or MPAA is reasoning from this false assumption, but there is a quote I've seen from Jack Valetti, that reads (very approximately, from memory ). "Those little guys, they only make 100,000$ a year. That's not much to live on.", so it sounds like some industry people might be.
The real reason the assumption is false is, when consumers estimate prices and values, they simply don't think of it like "I can't afford to buy one of those, so I'm freeloading on the system by watching the program this commercial pays for", so they think their income should be irrelevant to the company. Rather they think more in terms of "The company that advertised got its fair reward, whether it came from me or some other viewer" or "The company chose to advertise here - no one was pointing a gun at their head to make them do it. No one is pointing a gun at my head to make me watch." Then they decide that their income may be irrelevant to the advertiser, but it is still very relevant to themselves. Consumers don't haver much respect for an industry that doesn't want to admit that either of those last two quotes are valid, and less if some industry flack starts claiming the first quotes are true instead. If someone tells you that you are stealing just by getting up during the commercials and going to the bathroom, why should you believe them when they say you are stealing by downloading software or MP3s?
The original point about free software stems from the same clash of viewpoints. The downloaders don't view it as free, because they paid something to an ISP to get on the net, and they are paying in time and effort to find content, sit there twiddleing their thumbs while it downloads, and to burn it to a blank CD they also paid for. Often they have bought video capture cards, memory, or faster systems to get access to broadband. What did anyone expect them to do with a cable modem except download more and faster to get their extra 30$ a month use out of it? That often looks like about the same value as they pay for other entertainment, and the fact that none of it goes to the content producer is "not their fault".
I didn't go into some tangental assumptions in what was already a lengthy post.
In terms of what is only a "percieved" price instead of a real market derived one, it's probably fair to not include "station identification", commercials for other programs coming up (that's perceived as a cost the station has to help it sell commercials to someone else, and argueably many viewers are thinking from the assumption that a broadcasting corporation makes no money airing its own program ads, which is almost but not quite invariably true).
It also seems fair to me not to include "Public Service" announcements, and possibly even those commercials that fall between two blocks of programming, but you might want to refigure for all that and get a ratio more like 13 minutes of ads, 47 minutes of show.
Remember too the viewer often skips some commercials as well. Very few (if any) people think of it in terms of, "I took a bathroom break and made a sandwich, lets see, I guess I have to miss the last 9 minutes of this show, or watch a few extra commercials."
Sorry, but in the interests of keeping it simple, I didn't bother to specify nearly all the conditions that might shove the actual price estimates a bit one way or the other.
I think it's interesting that we could start from a lot of obviously false assumptions that would drive the estimates way up and still not see any matches between these price estimates and actual prices, costs or values. For example, we could make an assumption that people are equally likely to change channels during ads or programs, or one that assumes most advertisers are marketing a product that most viewers of a particular program can afford (Like if we assume that 90% of the watchers of Friends can afford an SUV, since some are advertised there), and then do this analysis for that particular program, and the percieved prices still come out very wonky.