No, I'm not. In the vast majority of cases, the copyright holder is the middleman. Most people who do creative work do so for someone else. The creator doesn't retain the copyright, the person they're doing the work for does.
What you're describing is a work for hire. In a work for hire, the person who is creating the creative work is not paying to produce it and is taking none of the financial risk of producing it. The "middleman" he's working for is doing all that. It's pretty obvious in most of those cases that the copyright should indeed go to the "middleman." The creator is hedging by trading ownership of the copyright for a secure salary or contract payment. If I were so confident that the software I create would sell, I would quit my job, start up my own company, and own the copyright to my own software. Instead, I join a company, they pay me regardless of the success of my software coding (more or less), and they get the copyright.
The exception is the music industry, which has lobbied and finangled copyright law so they can own the copyright while the artists pay for creating the work. The artists pay for creating the music (production costs come out of the artists' cut of the artists' royalties), yet the studios own the copyright.
People who want to keep their mail secret forever should burn it, and those same people shouldn't use GMail.
The difference is you can use postal mail for all your mail, and burn only the messages you don't want anyone else to see.
This decision makes that impossible with GMail (or any online mail service). You can either burn none, or burn them all (not use the service). There's no way to selectively burn only the mail you don't want others to see. Which I guess is something you shouldn't really expect from an online mail service anyway, but it still means the situation with online email is very different from postal mail.
How long until the telecos start demanding a surcharge on outsourced labor? "It's made possible by our pipes after all, and we're entitled to our 'fair share' of the cost savings other companies are reaping from outsourcing through our pipes."
If you're in it for the money, go sell real estate; please.
Money isn't some evil reward that only greedy people desire. Money is a measure of how much society values your time and work.
If people who took a few months' night classes to get a real estate license can make more money than people who studied 12 years for a technical degree in a difficult field but necessary field, that points to a fundamental problem in how society values individual accomplishments.
Ideally the valuation would be based on how much your work contributes to the betterment of society. Indeed, a free market tends to push valuation and wages in that direction. Unfortunately, your proximity to those who "set the price" often has a greater influence on the valuation of your work. That's why real estate brokers, bankers, membership-based professional fields (e.g. lawyers, doctors), managers, CEOs, etc. tend to be overpaid. They have enough control over "setting the price" that they can thwart free market forces to (correctly) devalue their wages to better match their contribution to society.
The error was caught and corrected, but not before the error had propogated to the tax revenue projection algorithms. Those revenue projections were done with the error in place. These projections were then used to set the tax rates - presumably so as to maintain about the same amount of revenue as the previous year.
Then it was found that the error made it into the projections. That meant the tax rates were too low, meaning the affected communities are receiving less revenue than projected.
Someone could've noticed the tax rate was lower than in previous years, but they might've attributed that to the red-hot real estate market inflating property values.
There is already a powerful organization dedicated to protecting that particular civil liberty, so why should the ACLU waste resources doing the same?
That's silly. Show me the rule that says only one organization is needed to protect anything. There are hundreds of environmental groups with a dozen or so high-profile ones. Would you take seriously any business group's argument that they don't need to waste resources in protecting the environment because such environmental groups are already doing so? That's the excuse you're trying to give for the ACLU.
The true measure of how much you value a principle is whether or not you'll protect it when it works against your other interests. Any mother can argue that her child should not be put to death for committing murder. But only a mother truly opposed to the death penalty can argue that her child's killer should not be put to death. Despite all the work for civil liberties the ACLU does, the fact that they won't protect the 2nd Amendment tells people they value restrictions on people's freedoms in certain cases more than they do blanket civil liberties. Not that I disagree with that stance, but [insert slippery slope argument civil liberties folks seem to be so fond of].
Keep in mind that CDs have a ton of error-correction coding on them. You could lose probably 20%-30% of the bits and still have a working CD. I suspect by "lifetime" the guy means when dye layer starts to deteriorate. Error correction can get you past that point, but you end up with a CD that reads fine one month, then "suddenly" develops dozens of bad sectors.
Most serious photographers I know re-burn their archives every one or two years.
1. Disaster. Nuclear engineers say that the chance of a meltdown is very small, but this argument is worthless after Harrisburg and Chernobyl. People in general are mathematically clueless, but they do know that the risk is real and not small after these two events.
It's interesting you'd bring up Harrisburg as support for your statement. Three Mile Island was a non-event. Despite the operators shutting off safety systems, ignorning warning signs, and basically doing everything they could do to screw things up, nothing happened. The reactor died, and the structure contained nearly all the dangerous material (there was a small release of slightly radioactive steam IIRC), as it was designed to do. TMI is a testament to how well the safety systems built into nuclear reactors worked despite the onslaught of human stupidity. Yes there was a lot of worrying about what might happen at the time. Engineers are like that - we like to err on the side of caution and think of worst case scenarios and plan around them. But most often (as in TMI) the worst case scenario never happens.
Citing Chernobyl as a reason against nuclear power is like citing the Hindenburg as a reason against aircraft. The technology is so outmoded the comparison is ludicrous.
The waste issue is the real problem. The safety issue is way overblown, just like people worry about dying in plane crashes and take a car instead (they're about 10x more likely to die in a car crash per distance traveled).
I would wager that the total pollution output per megawatt of the world's coal plants in the last 30 years far exceeds the pollution output per megawatt of the world's nuclear plants in the same period even if you include Chernobyl.
You can't just look at the worst disasters. You have to look at the average pollution output over an extended period of time. Your argument is like saying planes are less safe because when one crashes a lot more people die than in a car crash. If you analyze it on a per passenger-km basis, planes are much safer than cars.
The Burst patents don't cover all video streaming in general. Burst came up with and patented the streaming+caching technology that allows smooth playback of video over the internet. Before Burst, everyone would just have you download the whole file before playing, or do straight streaming which led to hiccups during playback.
Say you develop a video format that can be read without reading ahead (i.e. file doesn't have to be complete for the video to start playing).
Say the filesystem supports multi-read/write access, so a separate process can read a file even as that file is being written to disk.
Now say as you start downloading a video file. As it's downloading you start playing it from the beginning.
Is this streamed video being cached, or is the video being streamed in a way that takes advantage of properties of the video format and filesystem?
Funny about that... The current minimum [wage] places a family below the federal poverty level, unable (as Wal-Mart's chairman put it) to shop even at Wal-Mart.
Based on HHS figures for 2005 a single person is in poverty if he earns less than $9570/yr.
I suppose you could argue that not all families have both parents working. But if they're in poverty and they want to get out, they both pretty much should be working.
US Census poverty thresholds are very close to the figures the Dept. HHS gives. Mind you, personally I think the minimum wage should be increased; but the above back-of-the-envelope calcuation does not support your assertion. The real problem seems to be that people in poverty are only able to find/hold part-time jobs, and thus aren't able to rack up 40 hrs/wk, 48 wks/yr. But it seems to me that's more likely to be the fault of the individual (can't find extra work, don't want to work so many hours) than of businesses.
The ACLU supports civil rights. The way "the system" works is that it takes away the civil rights of the most despised (terrorists, etc.) and disenfranchised (poor, underclass) first and most people support these actions since these people are "evil".
Civil rights such as the right to bear arms.
The problem is that once "they" have established the right to take away civil rights, they can come after anyone (even you) if they don't like what you are saying or doing... it's a slippery slope.
So the ACLU by not defending the right to bear arms is helping "them" establish the right to take away civil rights, thus pushing all civil rights for everyone down this slippery slope.
Nothing against the ACLU in particular (I think they serve a valuable purpose), just pointing out the dubiousness of slippery slope arguments.
The last story was submitted as "lab worker forced to donate eggs" when the WSJ article it linked said nothing at all about coercion. The submitter completely misstated the article.
Same thing is going on with this submission. The linked BBC story says nothing about Dr. Hwang being forced to resign. In fact, it sounds like he resigned voluntarily. The submitter added the "forced" and "humiliated" part himself.
It's almost as if some slashdot submitters don't like what this guy is doing and are making up whatever spin and hyperbole they can to discredit him. Shame on the editors for not reading the linked articles to check if the submission description is accurate.
Second, the printhead is on the cartridge, so a clog means a lost cartridge, not a lost printer or making a flush kit to force Windex through your print head.
I'm still amazed that HP marketing has managed to fool so many people into thinking this is a plus. HP puts their print head on the cartridge because their engineering division wasn't able to figure out a reliable way to stop clogging. Putting it in the cartridge means you're paying for a new head with every cartridge even if you don't get a clog.
Apple can just say "but we had to bundle it to compete with Microsoft." When a company's market share approaches or is an effective monopoly, you have to hold it to different standards than competing companies for capitalism to work.
Nearly every piece of legislation passed by our illustrious lawmakers has a clause at the beginning saying that the provisions outlined in the bill do not apply to them. It's fairly standard (though I agree it's stupid).
Say you file a patent, you try to charge someone a licensing fee, they refuse to pay, you sue. If in the process there is found prior art, the patent is not invalidated. Instead it is transferred to the originator of the prior art, and the original patent owner is required to pay their originally demanded sum of the licensing fee to the new patent holder (after all, it's a given that they think it's a fair fee).
Companies/people would have a huge incentive to research for prior art on their own before filing a patent, relieving the patent office of that burden.
Obvious patents like this would be naturally filtered out because of the preponderance of prior art. The idea is so obvious everyone who thinks of it is reasonably sure someone else has thought of it before and has prior art.
Defensive patents would not be affected because they're never used to sue others.
You claim that Microsoft has no trademark on Windows. That's irrelevant. The guy decided not to fight.
That is entirely relevant. In fact that's the whole point. Laws exist so that (hopefully) the right outcome can come out of disputes. When a person/company can use the threat of the law to coerce/trick another party into an outcome opposite what you would expect from proper application of the law, something is seriously fubar.
If Microsoft has no trademark on 'Windows' then they have no right to send threatening letters to people claiming trademark infringement where none exists. That'd be like me sending people fake bills, then claiming the legality of the bills are irrelevant because the guys who paid me decided not to fight.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're describing is a work for hire. In a work for hire, the person who is creating the creative work is not paying to produce it and is taking none of the financial risk of producing it. The "middleman" he's working for is doing all that. It's pretty obvious in most of those cases that the copyright should indeed go to the "middleman." The creator is hedging by trading ownership of the copyright for a secure salary or contract payment. If I were so confident that the software I create would sell, I would quit my job, start up my own company, and own the copyright to my own software. Instead, I join a company, they pay me regardless of the success of my software coding (more or less), and they get the copyright.
The exception is the music industry, which has lobbied and finangled copyright law so they can own the copyright while the artists pay for creating the work. The artists pay for creating the music (production costs come out of the artists' cut of the artists' royalties), yet the studios own the copyright.
The difference is you can use postal mail for all your mail, and burn only the messages you don't want anyone else to see.
This decision makes that impossible with GMail (or any online mail service). You can either burn none, or burn them all (not use the service). There's no way to selectively burn only the mail you don't want others to see. Which I guess is something you shouldn't really expect from an online mail service anyway, but it still means the situation with online email is very different from postal mail.
How long until the telecos start demanding a surcharge on outsourced labor? "It's made possible by our pipes after all, and we're entitled to our 'fair share' of the cost savings other companies are reaping from outsourcing through our pipes."
Or you could move them to a location that provides the ultimate protection of anonymity: /dev/null
Money isn't some evil reward that only greedy people desire. Money is a measure of how much society values your time and work.
If people who took a few months' night classes to get a real estate license can make more money than people who studied 12 years for a technical degree in a difficult field but necessary field, that points to a fundamental problem in how society values individual accomplishments.
Ideally the valuation would be based on how much your work contributes to the betterment of society. Indeed, a free market tends to push valuation and wages in that direction. Unfortunately, your proximity to those who "set the price" often has a greater influence on the valuation of your work. That's why real estate brokers, bankers, membership-based professional fields (e.g. lawyers, doctors), managers, CEOs, etc. tend to be overpaid. They have enough control over "setting the price" that they can thwart free market forces to (correctly) devalue their wages to better match their contribution to society.
Then it was found that the error made it into the projections. That meant the tax rates were too low, meaning the affected communities are receiving less revenue than projected.
Someone could've noticed the tax rate was lower than in previous years, but they might've attributed that to the red-hot real estate market inflating property values.
That's how JPEG was introduced - an open and royalty-free graphics format. It still didn't help keep the patent hounds at bay.
Sounds like all you have to do is put a layer of aerogel around your spacecraft. You could call it a bra.
That's silly. Show me the rule that says only one organization is needed to protect anything. There are hundreds of environmental groups with a dozen or so high-profile ones. Would you take seriously any business group's argument that they don't need to waste resources in protecting the environment because such environmental groups are already doing so? That's the excuse you're trying to give for the ACLU.
The true measure of how much you value a principle is whether or not you'll protect it when it works against your other interests. Any mother can argue that her child should not be put to death for committing murder. But only a mother truly opposed to the death penalty can argue that her child's killer should not be put to death. Despite all the work for civil liberties the ACLU does, the fact that they won't protect the 2nd Amendment tells people they value restrictions on people's freedoms in certain cases more than they do blanket civil liberties. Not that I disagree with that stance, but [insert slippery slope argument civil liberties folks seem to be so fond of].
Most serious photographers I know re-burn their archives every one or two years.
> Yet it has displaced more people than any other power source.
As opposed to coal which "displaces" 30,000 people into their graves each year for just the US alone?
It's interesting you'd bring up Harrisburg as support for your statement. Three Mile Island was a non-event. Despite the operators shutting off safety systems, ignorning warning signs, and basically doing everything they could do to screw things up, nothing happened. The reactor died, and the structure contained nearly all the dangerous material (there was a small release of slightly radioactive steam IIRC), as it was designed to do. TMI is a testament to how well the safety systems built into nuclear reactors worked despite the onslaught of human stupidity. Yes there was a lot of worrying about what might happen at the time. Engineers are like that - we like to err on the side of caution and think of worst case scenarios and plan around them. But most often (as in TMI) the worst case scenario never happens.
Citing Chernobyl as a reason against nuclear power is like citing the Hindenburg as a reason against aircraft. The technology is so outmoded the comparison is ludicrous.
The waste issue is the real problem. The safety issue is way overblown, just like people worry about dying in plane crashes and take a car instead (they're about 10x more likely to die in a car crash per distance traveled).
You can't just look at the worst disasters. You have to look at the average pollution output over an extended period of time. Your argument is like saying planes are less safe because when one crashes a lot more people die than in a car crash. If you analyze it on a per passenger-km basis, planes are much safer than cars.
Say you develop a video format that can be read without reading ahead (i.e. file doesn't have to be complete for the video to start playing).
Say the filesystem supports multi-read/write access, so a separate process can read a file even as that file is being written to disk.
Now say as you start downloading a video file. As it's downloading you start playing it from the beginning.
Is this streamed video being cached, or is the video being streamed in a way that takes advantage of properties of the video format and filesystem?
SUVs are classified as light trucks, which have practically no safety or fuel efficiency requirements. This has been changing recently, but slowly.
Based on HHS figures for 2005 a single person is in poverty if he earns less than $9570/yr.
$5.15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 48 wk/yr = $9888/yr (assume 2 weeks unpaid vacation, 2 weeks unpaid holiday/sick)
For an average family of 2 adults, 2 children, the poverty level is $19,350/yr.
2 ppl * $5.15/hr * 40 hr/wk * 48 wk/yr = =$19776/yr.
I suppose you could argue that not all families have both parents working. But if they're in poverty and they want to get out, they both pretty much should be working.
US Census poverty thresholds are very close to the figures the Dept. HHS gives. Mind you, personally I think the minimum wage should be increased; but the above back-of-the-envelope calcuation does not support your assertion. The real problem seems to be that people in poverty are only able to find/hold part-time jobs, and thus aren't able to rack up 40 hrs/wk, 48 wks/yr. But it seems to me that's more likely to be the fault of the individual (can't find extra work, don't want to work so many hours) than of businesses.
Civil rights such as the right to bear arms.
The problem is that once "they" have established the right to take away civil rights, they can come after anyone (even you) if they don't like what you are saying or doing... it's a slippery slope.
So the ACLU by not defending the right to bear arms is helping "them" establish the right to take away civil rights, thus pushing all civil rights for everyone down this slippery slope.
Nothing against the ACLU in particular (I think they serve a valuable purpose), just pointing out the dubiousness of slippery slope arguments.
Same thing is going on with this submission. The linked BBC story says nothing about Dr. Hwang being forced to resign. In fact, it sounds like he resigned voluntarily. The submitter added the "forced" and "humiliated" part himself.
It's almost as if some slashdot submitters don't like what this guy is doing and are making up whatever spin and hyperbole they can to discredit him. Shame on the editors for not reading the linked articles to check if the submission description is accurate.
I'm still amazed that HP marketing has managed to fool so many people into thinking this is a plus. HP puts their print head on the cartridge because their engineering division wasn't able to figure out a reliable way to stop clogging. Putting it in the cartridge means you're paying for a new head with every cartridge even if you don't get a clog.
Apple can just say "but we had to bundle it to compete with Microsoft." When a company's market share approaches or is an effective monopoly, you have to hold it to different standards than competing companies for capitalism to work.
This is why every patent application should have to be accompanied by a functional prototype demonstrating the efficacy of the idea being patented.
Nearly every piece of legislation passed by our illustrious lawmakers has a clause at the beginning saying that the provisions outlined in the bill do not apply to them. It's fairly standard (though I agree it's stupid).
Say you file a patent, you try to charge someone a licensing fee, they refuse to pay, you sue. If in the process there is found prior art, the patent is not invalidated. Instead it is transferred to the originator of the prior art, and the original patent owner is required to pay their originally demanded sum of the licensing fee to the new patent holder (after all, it's a given that they think it's a fair fee). Companies/people would have a huge incentive to research for prior art on their own before filing a patent, relieving the patent office of that burden. Obvious patents like this would be naturally filtered out because of the preponderance of prior art. The idea is so obvious everyone who thinks of it is reasonably sure someone else has thought of it before and has prior art. Defensive patents would not be affected because they're never used to sue others.
That is entirely relevant. In fact that's the whole point. Laws exist so that (hopefully) the right outcome can come out of disputes. When a person/company can use the threat of the law to coerce/trick another party into an outcome opposite what you would expect from proper application of the law, something is seriously fubar.
If Microsoft has no trademark on 'Windows' then they have no right to send threatening letters to people claiming trademark infringement where none exists. That'd be like me sending people fake bills, then claiming the legality of the bills are irrelevant because the guys who paid me decided not to fight.
Sam's Club is Walmart. As in Sam Walton, founder of Walmart.