Under the common law, it is only possible to sue for defamation of an individual or corporation, not an object or generic group. This is why it is perfectly safe for you to say things like: "Lawyers are all liars and thieves." Saying that about a particular lawyer would be defamatory, if false, but you cannot be sued for the same statement about lawyers as a group. It is only possible to sue for defamation of a generic group if a state has made specific provision for doing so. The only exception that I know of are the food defamation laws that the agricultural industry has persuaded about a dozen states to pass. These which create civil liability for claiming that a perishable food product or commodity is unsafe for human consumption.
Neither the article nor the blog post contains much information about what exactly they're doing. Does "digitize" just mean "produce digital images", or are they going to OCR the images so that the text will be searchable and copyable? Obviously they're indexing them somehow, but whether it is full text indexing or not they don't say.
But it is also a bad doctor who treats the underlying cause without treating the symptoms if it will take a long time for the disease to go away and the symptoms are bothersome. Techniques like this should probably be used in conjunction with attempts to eliminate the causes of global warming.
It isn't as if this is so expensive that no money would be available for other approaches. Sure, $5 billion sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.5% of the what the US has spent on the Iraq War so far.
When writers work many years before becoming recognized, it is usually because they can't get their stuff published at all or because it isn't yet good enough to sell well. In that case, the odds are that nobody is going to want to go back and make a movie of your early work anyhow. Their interest will be in the relatively recent work that has gotten published and attracted public interest. If an author's work becomes classic, there may be revived interest in earlier work, but the odds are that that will happen after the author is dead, so it isn't really relevant here. How often does it happen that film producers become interested in the published work of a still living author produced more than 28 years ago on the basis of his or her recent work? I doubt that this situation arises often enough for us to take it into account in copyright law. (28 years rather than 14 is the relevant number since even the shortest serious proposals that I know of are like the old copyright law in providing for an initial copyright period of 14 years with the possibility of renewal for another 14.)
This kind of problem could easily be fixed if the telcos wanted to do it. One thing that would help would be to allow the customer to set his own limit on the phone and make it default
to something not very high, say $100, so that the customer has to make a decision about what is reasonable for him. When you hit the limit, you can't use the phone anymore until you raise it. You could have both a soft limit, where you get a warning, and a hard limit where you can't use the phone.
The other thing would be to have a display that shows the running cost of the call.
you know that "Freedom of Speech" only refers to the law that Congress can't abridge it.
Not true at all. You're thinking of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a particular feature of the US Constitution and doesn't have any legal force in other countries or apply to non-governmental entities in the United States. (By virtue of the 14th Amendment, it applies to the States as well as to the federal government.) "Freedom of Speech", on the other hand, is a value that exists independent of the US Constitution. Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the constitutions of many other countries and in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of which reads:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
High school in the US ends with grade 12. Students are typically 18 at the
end of this year. In some districts, high school consists of grades 9-12. In others, grades 7-9 are housed in a junior high school and high school consists of just grades 10-12. Grade 9 is referred to as "freshman" year and the students are called "freshmen". Grade 10 is "sophomore" year, grade 11 "junior" year, and grade 12 "senior" year.
Now it is. But when I was riding my bicycle in the countryside, which was admittedly
about thirty years ago, there were still quite a few older people who did not speak foreign languages or had long since forgotten what they had learned. And of course those are the ones one will chance to ask directions. Using the same technique I managed to find
probably the only two people in Luxembourg who did not speak French.
It's easy to practice Dutch. Just ride your bicycle into the countryside and get lost. I guarantee that the person of whom you ask directions will not speak English. Or French. Or German. Not only that, although they will understand your Dutch, you won't be able to understand the response because it will be in some non-standard dialect.:)
What's your beef with Tcl? Perhaps the changes aren't in the features you don't like, but Tcl has seen major changes over the years and is still actively developed.
I've had the same experience with CPAN: the code is often not very good, or the library doesn't really do what you expect it to do - a lot of contributions seem to be half-baked. In contrast, I have had a good experience with Tcl libraries. Perhaps one reason is that people put the half-baked stuff on the wiki (http://wiki.tcl.tk), where it is labeled as such, and don't present a full package until it is reasonably mature.
I'm guessing they wanted to include Microsoft and since Microsoft isn't a significant player in the scripting language area, they picked Microsoft's best scripting project, even though it isn't particularly important within the Ruby community.
Yeah, yeah, one language make it easier for the programmer to manipulate text or to develop some functionality for a particular task.
This sounds like a comment from twenty years ago. These days, with fast hardware and lots of memory, for a great many purposes making things easier and faster for the programmer is the most important goal.
Scripting languages also differ in more than syntax. They differ in the set of primitives and available library functions and in the efficiency of implementation of different components.
Both types are just "corporations" in the US and followed by "Inc."
There is no distinction in such abbreviations between privately held
and publicly traded companies.
The notion of "interstate commerce" in US law is completely screwed up. How else could the Supreme Court decide that the federal government has the authority under the Commerce Clause to outlaw the growing of medical marijuana in California?
Well, even El Al didn't see the need to prevent airline hijackings until they
started to be a problem. So the story really is that the first hijacking alerted El Al to the problem, they took measures in response, and those measures have prevented any further hijackings.
I suspect that a better solution is to set up nice, multi-user bathrooms with an attendant. The attendant will keep out the drug users and prostitutes, keep the place clean, and call for maintenance when necessary. Sure, an attendant costs money, but it is probably cheaper than the maintenance and amortization on high-tech bathrooms like this.
Unless I've missed something, the DMCA deals exclusively with copyright infringement. The linked rings symbol is trademarked by the IOC. There is no copyright in it, and certainly no copyright in the linked-handcuff symbol used in the Free Tibet video. Even granting that the IOC might have a case for trademark infringement, what entitles them to issue a DMCA takedown notice? Indeed, a DMCA takedown notice requires the issuer to attest under penalty of perjury that the issuer holds the copyright in the work in question. Did the IOC or its lawyer not commit perjury in issuing this notice?
Slashdot Mirror
First Amendment expert Eugene Volokh has a post on this decision over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Under the common law, it is only possible to sue for defamation of an individual or corporation, not an object or generic group. This is why it is perfectly safe for you to say things like: "Lawyers are all liars and thieves." Saying that about a particular lawyer would be defamatory, if false, but you cannot be sued for the same statement about lawyers as a group. It is only possible to sue for defamation of a generic group if a state has made specific provision for doing so. The only exception that I know of are the food defamation laws that the agricultural industry has persuaded about a dozen states to pass. These which create civil liability for claiming that a perishable food product or commodity is unsafe for human consumption.
Neither the article nor the blog post contains much information about what exactly they're doing. Does "digitize" just mean "produce digital images", or are they going to OCR the images so that the text will be searchable and copyable? Obviously they're indexing them somehow, but whether it is full text indexing or not they don't say.
But it is also a bad doctor who treats the underlying cause without treating the symptoms if it will take a long time for the disease to go away and the symptoms are bothersome. Techniques like this should probably be used in conjunction with attempts to eliminate the causes of global warming.
It isn't as if this is so expensive that no money would be available for other approaches. Sure, $5 billion sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.5% of the what the US has spent on the Iraq War so far.
When writers work many years before becoming recognized, it is usually because they can't get their stuff published at all or because it isn't yet good enough to sell well. In that case, the odds are that nobody is going to want to go back and make a movie of your early work anyhow. Their interest will be in the relatively recent work that has gotten published and attracted public interest. If an author's work becomes classic, there may be revived interest in earlier work, but the odds are that that will happen after the author is dead, so it isn't really relevant here. How often does it happen that film producers become interested in the published work of a still living author produced more than 28 years ago on the basis of his or her recent work? I doubt that this situation arises often enough for us to take it into account in copyright law. (28 years rather than 14 is the relevant number since even the shortest serious proposals that I know of are like the old copyright law in providing for an initial copyright period of 14 years with the possibility of renewal for another 14.)
The death of this awful bill alone is worth the expense and trouble of this basically unnecessary election.
This kind of problem could easily be fixed if the telcos wanted to do it. One thing that would help would be to allow the customer to set his own limit on the phone and make it default to something not very high, say $100, so that the customer has to make a decision about what is reasonable for him. When you hit the limit, you can't use the phone anymore until you raise it. You could have both a soft limit, where you get a warning, and a hard limit where you can't use the phone.
The other thing would be to have a display that shows the running cost of the call.
Not true at all. You're thinking of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is a particular feature of the US Constitution and doesn't have any legal force in other countries or apply to non-governmental entities in the United States. (By virtue of the 14th Amendment, it applies to the States as well as to the federal government.) "Freedom of Speech", on the other hand, is a value that exists independent of the US Constitution. Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the constitutions of many other countries and in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19 of which reads:
High school in the US ends with grade 12. Students are typically 18 at the end of this year. In some districts, high school consists of grades 9-12. In others, grades 7-9 are housed in a junior high school and high school consists of just grades 10-12. Grade 9 is referred to as "freshman" year and the students are called "freshmen". Grade 10 is "sophomore" year, grade 11 "junior" year, and grade 12 "senior" year.
Now it is. But when I was riding my bicycle in the countryside, which was admittedly about thirty years ago, there were still quite a few older people who did not speak foreign languages or had long since forgotten what they had learned. And of course those are the ones one will chance to ask directions. Using the same technique I managed to find probably the only two people in Luxembourg who did not speak French.
It's easy to practice Dutch. Just ride your bicycle into the countryside and get lost. I guarantee that the person of whom you ask directions will not speak English. Or French. Or German. Not only that, although they will understand your Dutch, you won't be able to understand the response because it will be in some non-standard dialect. :)
You can't do anything with Tcl? How about BitKeeper?
Flamebait? Not at all. Some moderators evidently have no sense of humor.
What! Introducing actual facts on /.?
What's your beef with Tcl? Perhaps the changes aren't in the features you don't like, but Tcl has seen major changes over the years and is still actively developed.
I've had the same experience with CPAN: the code is often not very good, or the library doesn't really do what you expect it to do - a lot of contributions seem to be half-baked. In contrast, I have had a good experience with Tcl libraries. Perhaps one reason is that people put the half-baked stuff on the wiki (http://wiki.tcl.tk), where it is labeled as such, and don't present a full package until it is reasonably mature.
I'm guessing they wanted to include Microsoft and since Microsoft isn't a significant player in the scripting language area, they picked Microsoft's best scripting project, even though it isn't particularly important within the Ruby community.
This sounds like a comment from twenty years ago. These days, with fast hardware and lots of memory, for a great many purposes making things easier and faster for the programmer is the most important goal.
Scripting languages also differ in more than syntax. They differ in the set of primitives and available library functions and in the efficiency of implementation of different components.
Yes, and on what kind of boxes do you run your Cobol programs, grandpa?
Both types are just "corporations" in the US and followed by "Inc." There is no distinction in such abbreviations between privately held and publicly traded companies.
The notion of "interstate commerce" in US law is completely screwed up. How else could the Supreme Court decide that the federal government has the authority under the Commerce Clause to outlaw the growing of medical marijuana in California?
Well, even El Al didn't see the need to prevent airline hijackings until they started to be a problem. So the story really is that the first hijacking alerted El Al to the problem, they took measures in response, and those measures have prevented any further hijackings.
There is already an airline rather like this, with real security. It's called El Al.
I suspect that a better solution is to set up nice, multi-user bathrooms with an attendant. The attendant will keep out the drug users and prostitutes, keep the place clean, and call for maintenance when necessary. Sure, an attendant costs money, but it is probably cheaper than the maintenance and amortization on high-tech bathrooms like this.
Unless I've missed something, the DMCA deals exclusively with copyright infringement. The linked rings symbol is trademarked by the IOC. There is no copyright in it, and certainly no copyright in the linked-handcuff symbol used in the Free Tibet video. Even granting that the IOC might have a case for trademark infringement, what entitles them to issue a DMCA takedown notice? Indeed, a DMCA takedown notice requires the issuer to attest under penalty of perjury that the issuer holds the copyright in the work in question. Did the IOC or its lawyer not commit perjury in issuing this notice?