I still fondly remember Qadgop the Mercoatan. In my tranship of memory, he (?) will forever slither flatly around the after-bulges. And John Campbell Jr. used the term 'space opera' at least as early as '38, while also using the term 'horse opera' for westerns. Smith probably heard his works classified as space opera in fan's letters very soon after the first Skylark was serialized, if not running across it before.
What's odd is that works by 'John Wyndham' haven't been seized up by Hollywood since 'Village of the Damned' and 'Triffids', and not much more of his stuff was adapted in Britain. (If memory serves, Chocky was made as a low budget TV movie or something like that, but even that was the 70's). But Hollywood could do "The Crysalids", "Out of the Deeps" (American title) and others, and have some easy tie ins for a publicity campaign ("From the author of Day of the Triffids!!!"), yet they don't.
One of John Brunner's books or stories ended up a movie long ago, but Hollywood misses the potential to adapt something such as "The Stone that Never Came Down" or "The Stardroppers" into a film - either of these could be done with a relatively low budget, and are about the right length to get all the major themes into a film. (But one would be 'too hippy-dippy liberal', and the other 'anti-fundamentalist'). Atlantic Abomination could make a good film on a bit bigger budget, as it would need more special effects. Any given section of "The Traveler in Black" could make a good self-contained fantasy film, on a modest budget, although there, I'd like to see some additional money thrown at special effects.
One of Poul Anderson's books got made into a really cheap film (The High Crusade), but Hollywood has missed all his best work (Is Tau Zero filmable? I say yes.). Operation Chaos would probably work well, or maybe a generalized adaptation of the Flandry books (Think James Bond, in space, and some real science in most of them).
You know, once you get past 'Libertarianism as taught by Ayn Rand 101', you can stop shrinking complex issues into sound bites. The question here isn't just whether businesses should have a right to charge higher fees based on heavier use. It's also, "Should businesses have the right to charge more for some types of use that create the same load, than for others?", and "Should businesses take money from the government and then still demand a regulation free market?", and particularly, "Should businesses have a right to promise one thing and deliver another?".
Re:No its worse than that
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Evolving Rocks
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You know, that's funny, because it's been the "Evolutionist" crew that's been misusing the term terribly. It's not I.D. supporters who are coining phrases such as "Stellar Evolution"*, and "Universal Evolution", and making claims that "Evolution is a more fundamental principle than the Second Law of Thermodynamics.", it's the pro-evolution 'crew'. It's people who are committed to natural selection above all that postulate that every black hole generates a new universe, and those universes are somehow being naturally selected for long lived ones where life can evolve. A fun idea, but there's absolutely no scientific evidence, and it's not coming from the I.D. side.
I hope you're not trying to imply that any time an Evolution supporter says something stupid, it's because the I.D. side has tricked them somehow, into giving the other side ammunition. Yes, I'm sure somebody on the I.D. side points to drivel like this and says "evolutionists don't know what they are talking about". That's because this particular one doesn't.
* If stars 'evolve' just because the 1st Generation has more heavy metals than the older, 2nd Generation, does that mean the newer generation stars live longer, or that they produce more offspring? What's the selection pressure that causes stellar evolution? What's the genetic code of a star?
Discussions about people being charged are meaningless. The real questions are: Would there be a conviction? And would a reasonable person interpret the law the way the courts now do? It's always possible to be sued or charged for all sorts of things that aren't really at all likely to result in a decision, at least if you can afford a lawyer.
Did you know that technically, every single person in the U.S. who has opened a pack of cigarettes and not torn the tax seal across instead of peeling it off, even once, is guilty of a felony?
Ads which are right for someone economically may not be right for them in other ways. Take a couple who can easily afford to have several children and drive a big SUV - but imagine they are supporters of sustainable energy, zero population growth, and so on. They've already committed to having only one child, they want a fuel efficient vehicle, preferably a hybrid or better. They are not in the market for most of the things which are going to be targeted at them based solely on income.
How can the ads be targeted at them too? There are several (mostly bad) possibilities. The advertisers could write them off, as not a market. Right now, advertisers ignore whole age groups in just this way. Nobody is going to pitch Axe style body sprays at men old enough to think of Old Spice or Right Guard when they buy a deodorant. When they don't target ANY of the ads at you, they don't target ANY of the programs at you either. Trying to hit a few big groups with descressionary spending power is why shows such as Survivor spawn dozens of variants, or TV goes through phases where its all Hospital shows or Forensic shows.
Or they could get more data. If they only knew how that couple I made up had voted as well, maybe they could get a handle on what they want to buy. Even better, if they know how committed the couple was to their ideals, how much they were willing to spend supporting a candidate or cause, just think how useful that would be in determining how much they would spend on the right product. And, they are already getting one type of data most people think is private, why not go after voting or medical information too?
You play on a Localized Server? WoW would probably donate the software for the publicity. Now the ship design params just need to include support for 25 Man raids.
Carnage Bloodbreath: Need Tnk 4 Blackrock Spire? Leroy Jenkins: I gotta patch another damned meteor hole. BRB. Carnage Bloodbreath: So that's what that noise was.
That depends a lot on what technologies we have by the time we colonize Mars. Torchships - assume we can sustain a continuous 1 G acceleration in space, presumably from a fusion drive. Mars is (very roughly, and allowing for some time to transfer from a more conventional rocket at a space station or similar limited version of torchship technology where we aren't allowed to run the fusion drives in Earth's atmosphere, etc) a week away. Plus, you can likely move a big payload, one where a few pinprick sized holes become trivial. Some of the Orion drive designs postulated doing a lunar colony in one shot, 1,000 crew, living quarters, machine shops, power plants, vehicle bays full of lunar rovers, several years food, water, and fuel, with only very limited recycling assumed. With controlled fusion, we ought to be able to equal moving an advanced Orion type payload all the way to Mars and not just the Moon. Anti-radiation pills - any cheap generalized anti-cancer drug or easy to tolerate treatment makes that level of radiation exposure much more tolerable. We're not talking levels where the mutation rate goes up (much), and so the radiation effects would mostly be cancer. Putting Psychology on a firm footing - You get to go with a group you can both trust and enjoy being with (or you are one of the ones left on Earth). The psychological stress isn't really travel time based, even if it still takes months, it's the spending years, maybe the rest of your life, with those same people once you get there. Probably you could have a very sane, cooperative bunch of people in the colony, and they could still suffer a great deal of stress if the political situation back on Earth flared up enough, so this could actually be the biggest obstacle. You don't just need a sane crew, but sanity world wide back home, especially if the colony isn't self sustaining yet.
But it is petty crime (at least mostly), that's being discovered. The whole technology was deployed as part of going after terrorists, the people who control the technology have special dispensations to act in various ways because the crime we hoped to stop is so serious, we the taxpayers put lots of money into efforts such as this because it's for the defense of the entire nation, and so on.
That's why this is a failure. It's like we spent putting a man on the moon money on a project, and the astronauts actually only got to Burbank, or we did a Manhattan Project to win, not World War 2, but the Battle for the Falklands. They accomplished a goal, but not the goal they said was worth all that effort, not the goal we were promised. Instead of the government admitting the damned rocket blew up on the pad, they brag "We developed a successful launch escape tower!".
Meth is sort of a special case. The evidence that there is real organic brain damage from repeated use is very strong, and (in this case) doesn't seem distorted by political pressure on the researchers. Doing something which you know will very likely destroy your ability to regulate your own behavior rationally is putting other people at risk. Being a 'typical' Meth user is like being an advanced alcoholic who already has a history of blackouts and DTs, or being one of those rare acidheads who really can't tell the difference between what's going on in his head under the influence of LSD and what's external reality. Choosing to do meth is like both choosing to drink and choosing to drive, or choosing to use a psychotropic when your doctor has already diagnosed borderline schizophrenia and put you on meds.
There's less such evidence against E (not none, but much less), and no reliable medical evidence against weed. I could make some good medical arguments that weed seems to encourage not maturing at the normal rate in adolescents, but none what-so-ever that it makes normal adults, or even adolescents, dangerous to others.
The summary used a lot of words to say it didn't work at catching terrorists, but it caught a few people with drugs. So of course they'll keep using it. "Doesn't work for what it was intended.", "Isn't justifiable for the department that funded it.", but it works in the War against Drugs? To the government, that's an incredible success story.
Folding at home IS part of searching for a cure for AIDS. You've just essentially said that if everybody shared the attitude of Pitabred, they would all be running software that helps find a cure for AIDS, because they had this bad attitude that didn't see the point in bothering to help find a cure for AIDS. Not only did you insult him for no good reason, but that doesn't even make any sense, and will probably trigger one of those damned posts about the Chewbaka defense.
Oh, and way to make SETI@Home look like a responsible, pro-science use of otherwise wasted processing power, instead of some weird cult that attracts rabid fanbois. You are not doing the cause you support any favors.
I'm not sure why words such as 'threat' keep showing up. Technically, you can say Stallman is advocating destroying something, but you could say the same about an architect who says "We'll have to bulldoze the old carport before we can put up the new addition." There's pure destruction, and there's change, and change invariably entails the old stuff not being around, unchanged, anymore. Anyone who advocates any change is advocating the old being destroyed, or allowed to destroy itself, or time erasing the old, whether we do anything to help time along or not.
I see people disagreeing with Stallman because they don't like the direction he's pointing towards, and want other changes instead, and that seems reasonable enough. I also see some who are disagreeing with the very idea of change, and want to change the real status quo, by changing things so there are huge forces working to stop all further change, and who swear they aren't advocating changing anything. That seems a mite paradoxical.
The DCMA has nothing to do with trademarks, AND there is absolutely no requirement to protect copyrights or lose them. None, Nada, Zip, Zero.
This is why the whole concept of IP law is a fraud. All types of IP have their own rules, and lumping them together is just an attempt to get around the actual law in the court of public opinion. Grouping IP law together lets Toyota sue people without valid grounds, and instead of the public deciding it's not safe not to buy cars from hyper-litigious bozos with deep pockets, they are often fooled into giving the company the benefit of a doubt and thinking the law virtually forces them to file. It doesn't, and do you really want your next car to come from people who, if they sold you a lemon, would probably counter-sue you on some equally ridiculous grounds if you tried to take action?
Are you sure they didn't? I've looked at the actual death footage and not just the rest of the documentary, and often it looks suspiciously like the same three or four guys getting blown up again and again.
And you have died in terrible agony recently, so you know better than he does, right? I see two people posting AC, and one of them is sure he has had more experience, and has a more realistic understanding, when he has no facts what-so-ever to base that opinion on.
Right of First sale applies to everything that is normally for sale - a car, a game, a plot of land, an iron lung, a kaleidoscope, a book, a piece of military grade ordnance, a packet of seeds, a factory, a soda pop, The fact that first sale prices are affected by resale values also applies to everything that can be resold. So how much profit margin a given industry enjoys, or what the costs of production are, these things are irrelevant.
It's simply a fact - some people who buy a videogame think, 'I can sell that back in a few months and get part of my money back", and that enters into what those people think is a fair price. It's a frellin fact. It's an absolute truth fnord-dammit!!!!! What the game maker got at first sale was already affected by some buyers' plans to resell the item and get part of their costs back. I shouldn't have to debate that fact. Maybe we should be discussing what the law should be, in light of that fact. Maybe we should be discussing just how significant the fact is as it affects the game makers overall sales. But unless you want to make a blanket claim that nobody ever resells anything they bought, I shouldn't be having to argue that fact.
Here, I'm starting a factory to make left handed Creeftons in my basement. You have to sign a contract saying you won't resell one, because.., uh because.... Oh yeah, because they are not cars! Never mind that they are pretty damned similar to something else covered by first sale doctrine, it shouldn't protect you here, because they aren't similar to cars. Oh, and in this one respect, they are in fact exactly like cars, because they too can be resold, but never mind that. I'm sure there's a reason why I should get special treatment.
Right, that's basically how a text parody works. You use small bits, but normally you have to make changes. For print fiction, that's usually at below the paragraph level, often below the sentence level. BotR took examples such as where Tolkien had characters mention their ancestors, and parodied the geneological aspect by lists of overflung, odd sounding ancestors. Not once in doing that could they leave as much as an original sentence intact, instead it became "Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt". They couldn't leave the first four verses of the ring poem intact, instead it was lines like "This ring and no other was made by the elves, who'd pawn their own mothers to get it themselves...". That's why it's a parody. You take things, such as Tolkien's tendency to sound biblical when he got in geneological mode, and you write something funny, satirical, or odd enough to draw attention to the 'flaws' or foibles of the original.
It's kind of unrealistic, even for fantasy, that the Hobbits are so prim and proper that even the illiterate lower classes know their ancestors for 20 generations and nobody ever has to admit that mum couldn't tell them for sure who their father was, so you poke fun at it. If the original didn't have that 'flaw', there's nothing to parody about that particular point, and if you just quoted the original intact every time it gets into geneological territory, you are not parodying it, at least on that point. To parody a work, you have to pick something specific to parody about that work, and write something of your own that refers to that something. Otherwise, what's to stop somebody from taking a copy of Gone with the Wind, using the replace command to change Scarlett's name to Luke and Rhett's to Obi Wan, and claim it's a Star Wars parody?
Anyone saying 'but the law theoretically allows this', can you name a single print parody that has whole paragraphs or above unaltered? "Bored of the Rings" and "Doon" certainly don't. Mad magazine typically did a parody every issue, and there wasn't a single sentence of the originals left unaltered in most cases, in fact they probably went 10 years without using a sentence from a source intact. Michael Moorcock prides himself on having never swiped a complete sentence or more in any of his parodical works, even when he parodied himself in "The Stone Thing". (And I doubt he would have sued himself).
Isn't arguing that the law doesn't specifically say you can't have huge chunks of unaltered text in a print parody a bit like claiming there's no law specifically against painting stripes going the other way on a Zebra and selling it as a rare crosshatched Llama?
A parody could be fair use, but substantial quotation doesn't belong in parodies. To create a parody the author would have to rewrite those quotations somewhat, not use them straight. I suppose that a parody could use some text without alteration, but surely it can't be a very high percentage of the total work.
David Gerrold once did a parody of E. E. (Doc) Smith's work, and accidentally transcribed an entire paragraph straight from Smith, based only on what he had read 10 years or more before. When he realized this, he went back and changed it before publication, thinking that an entire paragraph, in a short story sized work, was too much to justify. That's probably a pretty good rule of thumb.
There are some widely used methods of making it simple and straightforward for readers to determine which parts of a text are quoted material. The use of different fonts, font weights and sizes, indentation or italics are all practices which it seems fair to describe as industry standards, and are all simple to implement. While there are different methods, these reflect differences in how much material is being quoted, how much it resembles the non-quoted parts, and so on. Most publishers have policies that guide them in selecting one method from these several, but even if the 'wrong' method was picked, picking any method would show intent.
If the lexicon couldn't, in fact, be bothered to use one or more of these methods, I'd think that very point hurts their case. If the authors didn't have a clear idea of what they were doing in some general senses, I don't think they should be given the normal benefit of a doubt that they had a clear idea of how what they did fell within the confines of fair use either. Instead, they should bear some burden of proof that they considered fair use and formed a reasonable opinion instead of just not giving a damn.
In other words, this may not mean they are guilty of anything, but if it turns out they are, it would seem to be a possible aggrievating circumstance.
I don't recall the professionals as a whole 'freaking out' either, but when that 30,000 number began being bandied about, there were scientists who pointed out that some other species seemed to have a lot more than 30,000 genes (some amphibians in particular, had anomalously high numbers). I also recall comparisons to the numbers found in fruit flies, which led to comments that either fruit flies were a lot more complex than we had thought, or there was something else very strange going on.
There were estimates for humans based on the measured number of proteins (which was still a pretty incomplete count too at that time), but there were also alternate estimates for humans based on other things, such as assuming that with 23 chromosomes, the average number of genes per chromosome in humans ought to go up very close to linearly with the weight of a given chromosome, and the same ratios should apply across species (so as soon as you know how many genes are on any one chromosome of any species, you can extrapolate). When the 30,000 count was first announced, there was still a lot of debate between several different theorems such as these, so I can see both how the press had trouble explaining this well, and how at least some professionals gave some pretty awful interviews.
If the case was still intact (which is very unlikely), very toxic decay products would have accumulated in 40 years. The normal time to open a case and clean out the decay products is on the order of every three to five years, and old Soviet nukes that have sat for 10 or 12 before coming to the US for servicing are considered to require at least 10 to 25 times the costs, just to keep service crews as safe as they should be on a more normal bomb refitting. I shudder to think what it would cost to clean one of these puppies up if anybody had an intact one.
As to functioning, 10 years unserviced is a guaranteed fizzle, 40 years means even the conventional explosives are unlikely to go off properly to initiate, and the polonium, lead 210, and other decay product percentages in the pit mean there is really no chance of a nuclear fission primary stage reaction even if they did. He 2 contaminants diffused throughout the holraum would be at levels where there was even less chance of the secondary fusion stage working, if there's such a thing as less than zero.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this thread already has its full quota of trolls. Would you mind terribly relocating to under a bridge in one of the NASA can't keep it up on Mars style threads? Please don't move to any thread involving Apple, as they are even more overcrowded than here.
Oh, and please stop moving around just to find a mate - there are no she trolls here, because there are no she anythings - this is Slashdot after all.
Actually a car manufacturer makes extra money before the second hand car is sold. The first owner pays a price that includes an extra portion for how much that owner can make back by reselling the car in a few years. Take away used sales, and new sale prices drop. Same for the game manufacturer. So what this pig is complaining about is he only gets to make his money a few months faster on average, than the guy he sold it to gets to make some back. Now you know why American style capitalism doesn't work, whether the theoretical libertarian version would or not - Our 'visionary, self-made captains of industry' are actually 'whining, embittered, envious little losers'.
Other laws make all sorts of distinctions based on motives and other conditionals. Often, it's conditionals just like the distinction you are drawing that matter.
The FBI for example, becomes involved in kidnappings of victims defined as 'of tender age' (usually 12 and under). Many people believe the Lindberg law requires a ransom be sought, or that the victim be transported across state lines. Instead, the law lets the FBI start gathering evidence without either condition, just in case there's a federal crime, and the agency is looking for motives such as ransom or interstate movement for immoral purposes. Some of these motives may make a given kidnapping a federal crime. But, if the FBI doesn't find evidence to support a federal crime, they are supposed to pass the case back to the state agencies, and just provide lab services, database help and such on request.
Shouldn't copyright laws do something along these lines - make a distinction between organized crime and individual violators, violation for profit and violation for ego-boost? It's not only penalties that don't seem to reflect these distinctions, it's also a question of which agencies become involved. And there are other results that would be affected by making the right distinctions, such as limiting how much taxpayer money should support the forensic processes in trivial cases. That's all what doesn't seem to be happening anymore.
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I still fondly remember Qadgop the Mercoatan. In my tranship of memory, he (?) will forever slither flatly around the after-bulges.
And John Campbell Jr. used the term 'space opera' at least as early as '38, while also using the term 'horse opera' for westerns. Smith probably heard his works classified as space opera in fan's letters very soon after the first Skylark was serialized, if not running across it before.
What's odd is that works by 'John Wyndham' haven't been seized up by Hollywood since 'Village of the Damned' and 'Triffids', and not much more of his stuff was adapted in Britain. (If memory serves, Chocky was made as a low budget TV movie or something like that, but even that was the 70's). But Hollywood could do "The Crysalids", "Out of the Deeps" (American title) and others, and have some easy tie ins for a publicity campaign ("From the author of Day of the Triffids!!!"), yet they don't.
One of John Brunner's books or stories ended up a movie long ago, but Hollywood misses the potential to adapt something such as "The Stone that Never Came Down" or "The Stardroppers" into a film - either of these could be done with a relatively low budget, and are about the right length to get all the major themes into a film. (But one would be 'too hippy-dippy liberal', and the other 'anti-fundamentalist'). Atlantic Abomination could make a good film on a bit bigger budget, as it would need more special effects. Any given section of "The Traveler in Black" could make a good self-contained fantasy film, on a modest budget, although there, I'd like to see some additional money thrown at special effects.
One of Poul Anderson's books got made into a really cheap film (The High Crusade), but Hollywood has missed all his best work (Is Tau Zero filmable? I say yes.). Operation Chaos would probably work well, or maybe a generalized adaptation of the Flandry books (Think James Bond, in space, and some real science in most of them).
You know, once you get past 'Libertarianism as taught by Ayn Rand 101', you can stop shrinking complex issues into sound bites. The question here isn't just whether businesses should have a right to charge higher fees based on heavier use. It's also, "Should businesses have the right to charge more for some types of use that create the same load, than for others?", and "Should businesses take money from the government and then still demand a regulation free market?", and particularly, "Should businesses have a right to promise one thing and deliver another?".
You know, that's funny, because it's been the "Evolutionist" crew that's been misusing the term terribly. It's not I.D. supporters who are coining phrases such as "Stellar Evolution"*, and "Universal Evolution", and making claims that "Evolution is a more fundamental principle than the Second Law of Thermodynamics.", it's the pro-evolution 'crew'. It's people who are committed to natural selection above all that postulate that every black hole generates a new universe, and those universes are somehow being naturally selected for long lived ones where life can evolve. A fun idea, but there's absolutely no scientific evidence, and it's not coming from the I.D. side.
I hope you're not trying to imply that any time an Evolution supporter says something stupid, it's because the I.D. side has tricked them somehow, into giving the other side ammunition. Yes, I'm sure somebody on the I.D. side points to drivel like this and says "evolutionists don't know what they are talking about". That's because this particular one doesn't.
* If stars 'evolve' just because the 1st Generation has more heavy metals than the older, 2nd Generation, does that mean the newer generation stars live longer, or that they produce more offspring? What's the selection pressure that causes stellar evolution? What's the genetic code of a star?
Discussions about people being charged are meaningless. The real questions are: Would there be a conviction? And would a reasonable person interpret the law the way the courts now do? It's always possible to be sued or charged for all sorts of things that aren't really at all likely to result in a decision, at least if you can afford a lawyer.
Did you know that technically, every single person in the U.S. who has opened a pack of cigarettes and not torn the tax seal across instead of peeling it off, even once, is guilty of a felony?
Ads which are right for someone economically may not be right for them in other ways. Take a couple who can easily afford to have several children and drive a big SUV - but imagine they are supporters of sustainable energy, zero population growth, and so on. They've already committed to having only one child, they want a fuel efficient vehicle, preferably a hybrid or better. They are not in the market for most of the things which are going to be targeted at them based solely on income.
How can the ads be targeted at them too? There are several (mostly bad) possibilities. The advertisers could write them off, as not a market. Right now, advertisers ignore whole age groups in just this way. Nobody is going to pitch Axe style body sprays at men old enough to think of Old Spice or Right Guard when they buy a deodorant. When they don't target ANY of the ads at you, they don't target ANY of the programs at you either. Trying to hit a few big groups with descressionary spending power is why shows such as Survivor spawn dozens of variants, or TV goes through phases where its all Hospital shows or Forensic shows.
Or they could get more data. If they only knew how that couple I made up had voted as well, maybe they could get a handle on what they want to buy. Even better, if they know how committed the couple was to their ideals, how much they were willing to spend supporting a candidate or cause, just think how useful that would be in determining how much they would spend on the right product. And, they are already getting one type of data most people think is private, why not go after voting or medical information too?
You play on a Localized Server? WoW would probably donate the software for the publicity. Now the ship design params just need to include support for 25 Man raids.
Carnage Bloodbreath: Need Tnk 4 Blackrock Spire?
Leroy Jenkins: I gotta patch another damned meteor hole. BRB.
Carnage Bloodbreath: So that's what that noise was.
That depends a lot on what technologies we have by the time we colonize Mars.
Torchships - assume we can sustain a continuous 1 G acceleration in space, presumably from a fusion drive. Mars is (very roughly, and allowing for some time to transfer from a more conventional rocket at a space station or similar limited version of torchship technology where we aren't allowed to run the fusion drives in Earth's atmosphere, etc) a week away. Plus, you can likely move a big payload, one where a few pinprick sized holes become trivial. Some of the Orion drive designs postulated doing a lunar colony in one shot, 1,000 crew, living quarters, machine shops, power plants, vehicle bays full of lunar rovers, several years food, water, and fuel, with only very limited recycling assumed. With controlled fusion, we ought to be able to equal moving an advanced Orion type payload all the way to Mars and not just the Moon.
Anti-radiation pills - any cheap generalized anti-cancer drug or easy to tolerate treatment makes that level of radiation exposure much more tolerable. We're not talking levels where the mutation rate goes up (much), and so the radiation effects would mostly be cancer.
Putting Psychology on a firm footing - You get to go with a group you can both trust and enjoy being with (or you are one of the ones left on Earth). The psychological stress isn't really travel time based, even if it still takes months, it's the spending years, maybe the rest of your life, with those same people once you get there. Probably you could have a very sane, cooperative bunch of people in the colony, and they could still suffer a great deal of stress if the political situation back on Earth flared up enough, so this could actually be the biggest obstacle. You don't just need a sane crew, but sanity world wide back home, especially if the colony isn't self sustaining yet.
But it is petty crime (at least mostly), that's being discovered. The whole technology was deployed as part of going after terrorists, the people who control the technology have special dispensations to act in various ways because the crime we hoped to stop is so serious, we the taxpayers put lots of money into efforts such as this because it's for the defense of the entire nation, and so on.
That's why this is a failure. It's like we spent putting a man on the moon money on a project, and the astronauts actually only got to Burbank, or we did a Manhattan Project to win, not World War 2, but the Battle for the Falklands. They accomplished a goal, but not the goal they said was worth all that effort, not the goal we were promised. Instead of the government admitting the damned rocket blew up on the pad, they brag "We developed a successful launch escape tower!".
Meth is sort of a special case. The evidence that there is real organic brain damage from repeated use is very strong, and (in this case) doesn't seem distorted by political pressure on the researchers. Doing something which you know will very likely destroy your ability to regulate your own behavior rationally is putting other people at risk. Being a 'typical' Meth user is like being an advanced alcoholic who already has a history of blackouts and DTs, or being one of those rare acidheads who really can't tell the difference between what's going on in his head under the influence of LSD and what's external reality. Choosing to do meth is like both choosing to drink and choosing to drive, or choosing to use a psychotropic when your doctor has already diagnosed borderline schizophrenia and put you on meds.
There's less such evidence against E (not none, but much less), and no reliable medical evidence against weed. I could make some good medical arguments that weed seems to encourage not maturing at the normal rate in adolescents, but none what-so-ever that it makes normal adults, or even adolescents, dangerous to others.
The summary used a lot of words to say it didn't work at catching terrorists, but it caught a few people with drugs. So of course they'll keep using it. "Doesn't work for what it was intended.", "Isn't justifiable for the department that funded it.", but it works in the War against Drugs? To the government, that's an incredible success story.
Folding at home IS part of searching for a cure for AIDS. You've just essentially said that if everybody shared the attitude of Pitabred, they would all be running software that helps find a cure for AIDS, because they had this bad attitude that didn't see the point in bothering to help find a cure for AIDS. Not only did you insult him for no good reason, but that doesn't even make any sense, and will probably trigger one of those damned posts about the Chewbaka defense.
Oh, and way to make SETI@Home look like a responsible, pro-science use of otherwise wasted processing power, instead of some weird cult that attracts rabid fanbois. You are not doing the cause you support any favors.
I'm not sure why words such as 'threat' keep showing up. Technically, you can say Stallman is advocating destroying something, but you could say the same about an architect who says "We'll have to bulldoze the old carport before we can put up the new addition." There's pure destruction, and there's change, and change invariably entails the old stuff not being around, unchanged, anymore. Anyone who advocates any change is advocating the old being destroyed, or allowed to destroy itself, or time erasing the old, whether we do anything to help time along or not.
I see people disagreeing with Stallman because they don't like the direction he's pointing towards, and want other changes instead, and that seems reasonable enough. I also see some who are disagreeing with the very idea of change, and want to change the real status quo, by changing things so there are huge forces working to stop all further change, and who swear they aren't advocating changing anything. That seems a mite paradoxical.
The DCMA has nothing to do with trademarks, AND there is absolutely no requirement to protect copyrights or lose them. None, Nada, Zip, Zero.
This is why the whole concept of IP law is a fraud. All types of IP have their own rules, and lumping them together is just an attempt to get around the actual law in the court of public opinion. Grouping IP law together lets Toyota sue people without valid grounds, and instead of the public deciding it's not safe not to buy cars from hyper-litigious bozos with deep pockets, they are often fooled into giving the company the benefit of a doubt and thinking the law virtually forces them to file. It doesn't, and do you really want your next car to come from people who, if they sold you a lemon, would probably counter-sue you on some equally ridiculous grounds if you tried to take action?
Are you sure they didn't? I've looked at the actual death footage and not just the rest of the documentary, and often it looks suspiciously like the same three or four guys getting blown up again and again.
And you have died in terrible agony recently, so you know better than he does, right? I see two people posting AC, and one of them is sure he has had more experience, and has a more realistic understanding, when he has no facts what-so-ever to base that opinion on.
Right of First sale applies to everything that is normally for sale - a car, a game, a plot of land, an iron lung, a kaleidoscope, a book, a piece of military grade ordnance, a packet of seeds, a factory, a soda pop, The fact that first sale prices are affected by resale values also applies to everything that can be resold. So how much profit margin a given industry enjoys, or what the costs of production are, these things are irrelevant.
It's simply a fact - some people who buy a videogame think, 'I can sell that back in a few months and get part of my money back", and that enters into what those people think is a fair price. It's a frellin fact. It's an absolute truth fnord-dammit!!!!! What the game maker got at first sale was already affected by some buyers' plans to resell the item and get part of their costs back. I shouldn't have to debate that fact. Maybe we should be discussing what the law should be, in light of that fact. Maybe we should be discussing just how significant the fact is as it affects the game makers overall sales. But unless you want to make a blanket claim that nobody ever resells anything they bought, I shouldn't be having to argue that fact.
Here, I'm starting a factory to make left handed Creeftons in my basement. You have to sign a contract saying you won't resell one, because.., uh because.... Oh yeah, because they are not cars! Never mind that they are pretty damned similar to something else covered by first sale doctrine, it shouldn't protect you here, because they aren't similar to cars. Oh, and in this one respect, they are in fact exactly like cars, because they too can be resold, but never mind that. I'm sure there's a reason why I should get special treatment.
Right, that's basically how a text parody works. You use small bits, but normally you have to make changes. For print fiction, that's usually at below the paragraph level, often below the sentence level. BotR took examples such as where Tolkien had characters mention their ancestors, and parodied the geneological aspect by lists of overflung, odd sounding ancestors. Not once in doing that could they leave as much as an original sentence intact, instead it became "Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt". They couldn't leave the first four verses of the ring poem intact, instead it was lines like "This ring and no other was made by the elves, who'd pawn their own mothers to get it themselves...". That's why it's a parody. You take things, such as Tolkien's tendency to sound biblical when he got in geneological mode, and you write something funny, satirical, or odd enough to draw attention to the 'flaws' or foibles of the original.
It's kind of unrealistic, even for fantasy, that the Hobbits are so prim and proper that even the illiterate lower classes know their ancestors for 20 generations and nobody ever has to admit that mum couldn't tell them for sure who their father was, so you poke fun at it. If the original didn't have that 'flaw', there's nothing to parody about that particular point, and if you just quoted the original intact every time it gets into geneological territory, you are not parodying it, at least on that point. To parody a work, you have to pick something specific to parody about that work, and write something of your own that refers to that something. Otherwise, what's to stop somebody from taking a copy of Gone with the Wind, using the replace command to change Scarlett's name to Luke and Rhett's to Obi Wan, and claim it's a Star Wars parody?
Anyone saying 'but the law theoretically allows this', can you name a single print parody that has whole paragraphs or above unaltered? "Bored of the Rings" and "Doon" certainly don't. Mad magazine typically did a parody every issue, and there wasn't a single sentence of the originals left unaltered in most cases, in fact they probably went 10 years without using a sentence from a source intact. Michael Moorcock prides himself on having never swiped a complete sentence or more in any of his parodical works, even when he parodied himself in "The Stone Thing". (And I doubt he would have sued himself).
Isn't arguing that the law doesn't specifically say you can't have huge chunks of unaltered text in a print parody a bit like claiming there's no law specifically against painting stripes going the other way on a Zebra and selling it as a rare crosshatched Llama?
A parody could be fair use, but substantial quotation doesn't belong in parodies. To create a parody the author would have to rewrite those quotations somewhat, not use them straight. I suppose that a parody could use some text without alteration, but surely it can't be a very high percentage of the total work.
David Gerrold once did a parody of E. E. (Doc) Smith's work, and accidentally transcribed an entire paragraph straight from Smith, based only on what he had read 10 years or more before. When he realized this, he went back and changed it before publication, thinking that an entire paragraph, in a short story sized work, was too much to justify. That's probably a pretty good rule of thumb.
There are some widely used methods of making it simple and straightforward for readers to determine which parts of a text are quoted material. The use of different fonts, font weights and sizes, indentation or italics are all practices which it seems fair to describe as industry standards, and are all simple to implement. While there are different methods, these reflect differences in how much material is being quoted, how much it resembles the non-quoted parts, and so on. Most publishers have policies that guide them in selecting one method from these several, but even if the 'wrong' method was picked, picking any method would show intent.
If the lexicon couldn't, in fact, be bothered to use one or more of these methods, I'd think that very point hurts their case. If the authors didn't have a clear idea of what they were doing in some general senses, I don't think they should be given the normal benefit of a doubt that they had a clear idea of how what they did fell within the confines of fair use either. Instead, they should bear some burden of proof that they considered fair use and formed a reasonable opinion instead of just not giving a damn.
In other words, this may not mean they are guilty of anything, but if it turns out they are, it would seem to be a possible aggrievating circumstance.
I don't recall the professionals as a whole 'freaking out' either, but when that 30,000 number began being bandied about, there were scientists who pointed out that some other species seemed to have a lot more than 30,000 genes (some amphibians in particular, had anomalously high numbers). I also recall comparisons to the numbers found in fruit flies, which led to comments that either fruit flies were a lot more complex than we had thought, or there was something else very strange going on.
There were estimates for humans based on the measured number of proteins (which was still a pretty incomplete count too at that time), but there were also alternate estimates for humans based on other things, such as assuming that with 23 chromosomes, the average number of genes per chromosome in humans ought to go up very close to linearly with the weight of a given chromosome, and the same ratios should apply across species (so as soon as you know how many genes are on any one chromosome of any species, you can extrapolate). When the 30,000 count was first announced, there was still a lot of debate between several different theorems such as these, so I can see both how the press had trouble explaining this well, and how at least some professionals gave some pretty awful interviews.
If the case was still intact (which is very unlikely), very toxic decay products would have accumulated in 40 years. The normal time to open a case and clean out the decay products is on the order of every three to five years, and old Soviet nukes that have sat for 10 or 12 before coming to the US for servicing are considered to require at least 10 to 25 times the costs, just to keep service crews as safe as they should be on a more normal bomb refitting. I shudder to think what it would cost to clean one of these puppies up if anybody had an intact one.
As to functioning, 10 years unserviced is a guaranteed fizzle, 40 years means even the conventional explosives are unlikely to go off properly to initiate, and the polonium, lead 210, and other decay product percentages in the pit mean there is really no chance of a nuclear fission primary stage reaction even if they did. He 2 contaminants diffused throughout the holraum would be at levels where there was even less chance of the secondary fusion stage working, if there's such a thing as less than zero.
I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this thread already has its full quota of trolls. Would you mind terribly relocating to under a bridge in one of the NASA can't keep it up on Mars style threads? Please don't move to any thread involving Apple, as they are even more overcrowded than here.
Oh, and please stop moving around just to find a mate - there are no she trolls here, because there are no she anythings - this is Slashdot after all.
Actually a car manufacturer makes extra money before the second hand car is sold. The first owner pays a price that includes an extra portion for how much that owner can make back by reselling the car in a few years. Take away used sales, and new sale prices drop. Same for the game manufacturer. So what this pig is complaining about is he only gets to make his money a few months faster on average, than the guy he sold it to gets to make some back. Now you know why American style capitalism doesn't work, whether the theoretical libertarian version would or not - Our 'visionary, self-made captains of industry' are actually 'whining, embittered, envious little losers'.
Other laws make all sorts of distinctions based on motives and other conditionals. Often, it's conditionals just like the distinction you are drawing that matter.
The FBI for example, becomes involved in kidnappings of victims defined as 'of tender age' (usually 12 and under). Many people believe the Lindberg law requires a ransom be sought, or that the victim be transported across state lines. Instead, the law lets the FBI start gathering evidence without either condition, just in case there's a federal crime, and the agency is looking for motives such as ransom or interstate movement for immoral purposes. Some of these motives may make a given kidnapping a federal crime. But, if the FBI doesn't find evidence to support a federal crime, they are supposed to pass the case back to the state agencies, and just provide lab services, database help and such on request.
Shouldn't copyright laws do something along these lines - make a distinction between organized crime and individual violators, violation for profit and violation for ego-boost? It's not only penalties that don't seem to reflect these distinctions, it's also a question of which agencies become involved. And there are other results that would be affected by making the right distinctions, such as limiting how much taxpayer money should support the forensic processes in trivial cases. That's all what doesn't seem to be happening anymore.