..... to challenge a patent would as a defense once sued over said patent.....
So then all the EFF has to do is advertise far and wide that they will defend any victim of a patent troll that tries extortion based on a prior art patent that should never have been granted in the first place. If such a troll sues, the EFF comes with all its researched prior art and skilled lawyers to invalidate the patent.
......and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.........
I don't believe that even for a nanosecond. I bet that bit for bit, these big broadcasters of data pay only an infinitesimal fraction for each bit they shovel out onto the Internet, compared to what each consumer pays for each of the bits that come down their ISP connection.
The Internet inherently is NOT a broadcast medium, but a point to point communications network. It is being misused by a relatively few large broadcasters sending their signals to millions of receivers. In broadcasting, the number of receivers listening to the signal does NOT affect the cost of getting that signal to each receiver. Whatever the cost of getting the signal out to the receiver(s), it is all borne by the sender.
For the Internet, there is a cost associated with reaching each receiver. Right now, the receivers are paying the lions share of getting the data from the sending station to the receiver. It seems that the senders who wish to reach the receivers on the Internet should pay whatever the costs are, not the receivers. If the receiving of data were free or low cost, how much would the Apples and Googles of this world have to pay for shoveling their terabytes per day data onto the Internet?
Why not charge for the bits at the SENDING end and have the receiving of the bits free or very low cost? Receiving a normal phone call or broadcast doesn't cost anything extra. If I subscribe to Cable or Satellite TV, do they charge according to how many hours the TV set is turned on and receiving bits of data? No? Why then should it cost extra to receive bits of data over the Internet?
....service provider has carefully planned things out......
That's patently false. It's just that for ordinary phone service, no new kind of content has come along that has significantly increased number of phone customers wanting to use the phone at once. If somebody invented a "magic modem" that would allow 100Mb/s dial up, they would suddenly have the same sort of problem -- namely not enough phone lines.
Most ISP's capacity was set up in the beginning for email and simple web surfing. Computer performance and cheap storage has made video possible, but the old ISP capacity has not adapted to the new applications.
To pay for this added capacity, charge the UPloaders of all this content whatever it costs. Consumers should not pay, neither should the carriers. The PROVIDERS of all this added high bandwidth content should pay for the added costs. Charge for data transmitted out onto the Internet, not data received. That's how it has always been with ordinary phones and still is.
....Young people, technophiles, nerds, sure, they download large files.....
Assuming that it costs a certain sum total to provide Internet service, the whole or most cost should be borne by the providers of the information, just like it is in the broadcast industry. Instead of charging at all for DOWNloads, charge CONSUMERS only for uploads, beyond a set limit. On the telephone, the charge is for the calls made, not for the ones received. Anyone who wants to SEND information should pay whatever the ISPs can get away with. Really big "broadcasters" such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others could still shop around for their best providers. Consumers generally don't generate, ie. broadcast much information and should pay little or nothing to receive the information from those who do profit by generating this data. This would also reduce spam greatly, since the senders of information would pay. Any ordinary consumer with a compromised bot computer would get a fat bill for excess uploads. They would thereby have a compelling reason to clean the vermin out of their computers that caused them to get a large bill.
I believe you are right. The pressure per se, would still steadily increase, all the way to the center, but the pressure GRADIENT would go towards zero. If there could be a hollow chamber in the center, one that could stand the pressure of the rock above it, then anything inside that chamber would not experience any net gravitational force. Is that not correct?
I came across an interesting article titled "The History of Black Holes". It gives reasons why they don't exists as a physical reality, but only as a theoretical, mathematical construct, and even then only if certain assumptions are made. If you are interested, you can get it here:
The reason why black holes have not been discovered and directly observed is simple: The are no such things. Neither is there dark matter/energy, parallel Universes, strings, worm holes and other mathematical fictions.
.....it just balances out from all directions.........
If the force is balanced in all directions, doesn't that mean that there is no net force? Is that not why we don't experience the considerable atmospheric pressure? The pressure inside and outside balances.
If the mass of each particle of rock in the center of the earth has a net force of zero on it due to the mass of the earth above it in all directions, then how can gravity act to push the particles closer to each other? How would this change as you make the sphere of matter more and more massive? If this balancing effect does NOT change as more mass is piled on, then matter in the center of a so called black hole would never be compressed dense enough to ever even form a black hole in the first place.
Maybe, the reason we have never observed a purely mathematical construct called a black hole, is simply that such things don't exist in the physical universe we live in.
I believe that science, first and foremost, must be based on observations and experiments. If then, AFTER that, these real observations can be described with words and elegant mathematics, so much the better. However, mathematical gyrations must always be backed up by observations and experiments. In the case of black holes, there is some very nice math that describes them and some of their supposed properties. Math is NOT reality, but may be and is successfully used as another language to describe reality.
Einstein came up with some mathematical concepts that made certain predictions about reality. What made these concepts valid and valuable is that they were verified by numerous careful, at times very dramatic experiments and observations. By stark contrast, black holes, dark matter/energy, strings, solar thermonuclear fusion, multiple dimensions and so many other mathematical fantasies have NOT been verified by actual scientific observations. It's fun to speculate about such fantasies, but it's not science.
......einstein started out with thought experiments.......
I was under the impression that experiments were real, not something imagined in some brain, even Einstein's brain.
Nobody has ever directly observed a back hole. Here is a different thought experiment:
Suppose it were technically possible to drill a hole clear through the Earth. If then a rock were dropped into the hole, would it not eventually come to rest, floating right in the center of the planet? Would that not mean that in the exact center there is no gravity to cause pressure on the material in the center either?
Would this canceling out of the gravity also then preclude enough pressure from happening to squeeze matter to anywhere near the density to eliminate all space between atomic constituents? Would this canceling of gravity be reversed if enough matter were piled together in one place? It seems to me, not, that in any sphere of matter of any mass, the gravitational pressure on the material in the center should always be zero. Would this not preclude the formation of a real physical object, a so called "black hole" as described in the purely mathematical constructs that postulate the real existence of such things? Of course if there are no real physical black holes, then there wouldn't be any real physical "worm holes" or any other kinds of "holes" either.
Does this canceling of pressure in the center of the sun mean that there isn't such a huge pressure there, even enough to allow atoms to fuse?
We know from real experiments and everyday experience, that heat always moves for the hotter place to the cooler place. Why is it then that we actually MEASURED that the outside of the sun, the corona is thousands of time hotter than than its surface? Why are sunspots, apparent holes in the surface of the sun, significantly cooler than the surrounding surface?
Could it be that the idea that atomic fusion with its requirement of million degree temperatures in the interior of the sun is just plain wrong? Maybe the sun is powered neither by an ancient wood campfire nor by a modern thermonuclear camp fire.
Maybe it is time to base science solely on experiments and observations, rather than fanciful math that has little if any semblance to reality as we can observe it. I think that real science, based on experiment and observation should be well separated from science fiction even if the fiction is very beautiful mathematically, or makes for intriguing and exciting movies.
What is striking about almost all of the craters is where the material that was gouged out of the surface went. The areas outside of most craters is devoid of material, both from the impacting object, as well as from the planet. It's as if it left the planet entirely. This is true of even the smaller craters presumably made by relatively low energy events that should not have propelled the fragments fast enough for them to escape the planet's gravity.
Even at the crater in Arizona, not matter foreign to the area was ever found. In 1908, a large section of forest in Siberia was leveled by a huge explosion, thought to be caused by a massive strike from space. However, there also, no foreign matter was found so far. Could these craters on planets be formed by other mechanisms, beside the impact of a big chunk of matter?
.....So any BitTorrent client (or virtually any other P2P software) is a "server" by your definition then......
Indeed so, because the NAT router will not allow incoming access to any computer on the local network unless the router is specifically programmed to pass external requests to a particular computer on the local network. That computer in effect then becomes a server accessible any time, from the Internet for that particular service. Any _unsolicited_ external requests from the Internet that require a response from a particular computer on the internal network, behind the NAT, makes that computer a server.
.......The MPAA and RIAA overlords dont want you to have fast intertubes......
Question: Other than downloading entertainment, what would the average Joe or Jane use a super-fast Internet connection for? E-mail -- oh yeah, that much more spam? Surf the web -- works pretty well already for those who can still read.
Maybe we can go back to the mainframe days, where processing is done somewhere in centrally controlled mega-computers and the users have a simple terminal, rather than a full fledged autonomous personal computer. Whoever controls those computers then will also control all data, public and private.
Neither cell phones nor the Internet are presently as reliable as the good old-fashioned telephone service, at least where we live. We have a UPS but that doesn't do any good for Internet service when the power goes off in the area. The local amplifiers/repeaters for the DSL go off, but the phones on that same line continue to work just fine. Maybe, when the Internet becomes as reliable as the old phones, they can talk about more bandwidth. Reliability is FAR more important. I'm sure that the Egyptians can still use their phones, even though their Internet is down because of a broken cable.
What do the ordinary Japanese do with their so much faster connections? Do they really use all that bandwidth?
How about; A computing device that accepts random, unsolicited connection from other computing devices". It's generally the kind of connection that a NAT router prevents unless especially set up to allow that. As part of the service, many ISPs supply a wireless NAT router which blocks incoming traffic from the local network.
Presumably, the friend would give permission to copy the CD he owns. He keeps the original and I get a copy he let me make. That is copyright infringement, but not stealing, since I had permission to copy the CD and he still has it in his collection. He has not lost anything. If there is nothing lost, how can that be stealing?
......So if I sneak into a nuclear lab and take pictures of the original blueprints for a nuclear bomb........
If you sneak, then by definition you have no business being there in the first place. However if you were invited in and they told you could take all the pictures you like, then you would not be in trouble. So your analogy is very ill fitting. Besides, the copyright on the bomb expired and the plans for it are now public domain. Anyone with a good machine shop and the skill to use it, could build one. Getting enough fissionable material is the hard part of making a nuke.
(....However, if I make copies of an original CD and then sell those copies....)
I agree that if someone sells copies or even gives them away, that could be construed as theft, since that would be truly depriving the originator of payment for their effort.
........one less album sale that would be made........
One less album sale that COULD be made. There fixed it for you.
If I get a copy of some music from someone, it does NOT logically follow that I would have bought that album if I had not received that copy. To the contrary, If I get a song from someone and like it very much, there is a high probability I'll go buy the whole album of that performer or composer and there will be a sale, where there was none before I was introduced to that piece.
....taking copies of music/movies is still stealing........
Making a copy of something, without harming the original is not stealing. It never was. Before the printing press was invented and before recordings and photographs, literature and music thrived in every culture. To make a copy back then required almost as much labor as the original. Artists who were good, like any other skilled person were able to make a living at their art, sometimes. Most of them did it for the love of the art, making their daily bread by some other skill.
When technology of easily making copies came, the idea of copyright, artificially granted by the sovereign, came into being. At first copyright was to prevent others, for a limited time, from making a business of simply duplicating someone's creative work. As copying became easier the time was repeatedly extended as was the scope, to include non-commercial private copies.
If someone rips a CD they bought to their iPod, there is no loss to anyone and copyright is not needed. Of course the **IAA people would like to make people pay for each and every time they LISTEN to a recorded work, even though it costs nothing to listen. When someone buys *anything* the have the moral right to use it any moral fashion. There is no moral difference whether it is a hammer or a CD. The state alone now has made a LEGAL difference between the two and that is called copyright.
.......just that theoretical patents should be valid in many instances.....
I have this theoretical patent of a teleportation device using mind projection. I have not made an actual working demonstration yet, because it is VERY expensive and dangerous. Anyone attempting to make it work could lose their mind. Maybe I'll build a new kind of cold fusion nuclear reactor instead.
Seriously, should anything that is simply an idea, figment of somebody's imagination get a PATENT? It seems to me that patents should be confined to ideas that actually work at the time the patent is filed. If inventors were actually required to DEMONSTRATE their ideas with a working model, rather than filing an obtuse piece of legalese paper, the number of patent applications would go down dramatically patent trolls would be out of business. Of course the way things are today, the system ensures full employment to a growing army of paper pushing, unproductive, lawyer drones specializing in IP and patents, but who know next to nothing about the invention itself they are filing about.
They may all be part of the same theory, but the gravitational interaction and the electric interaction are VERY different. Applying the same rules, limitations and principles to them both is clearly a step of faith, not science. We don't KNOW, by actual measurement and observation, any more about gravity today than what Newton discovered a good while ago. The basic rules by which planets and spaceships move were established by him and are still used, essentially unchanged. Einstein and his theories are not used at all when calculating the path of a rocket to the Moon or Mars. Einstein developed theories, parts of which are well verified by experiment and observations. Those verified theories ALL involve the electric interaction. We are very familiar with the gravity and time, but both of these are still mostly mysterious to us as to their fundamental nature. By comparison, in the study of the nature of the electric interaction, both practically and theoretically, we are much further along.
So much effort is expended today in trying to make the data fit existing theory, rather than looking to fit the theory to the data. Cosmologists are having an ever harder time to make the what appears to be strange data fit existing theories. This is what religion does. They have a dogma which they will defend to the death, sometimes literally putting to death or persecuting people like Kepler and Copernicus and others who come up with observations that don't fit the 'accepted" data of the day. I had always thought that true scientists are above that sort of behavior, preferring to seek truth, regardless if that truth might demolish a PhD. thesis or even a whole life's work developing a theory. Maybe I'm naive about this.
......You do not qualify as a person because you are a monster......
I hope you are joking! However this redefining of what a person is as old as humanity. Slaves were considered property and killing a slave was not punished as murder. The Nazis considered Jews and others as "Untermenschen" ie. beneath human and "put down" million of them. Radical Moslem factions consider Jews and non-moslems "infidels" that can be blown to bits and bring the perpetrator of such a deed a rich reward from Allah.
Today, our society considers the unborn as mere "fetuses", unwanted tissue, instead of persons. We have killed over 40 million such persons since the SCOTUS handed down the ruling making abortion legal.
So then why not add gun owners to such a group worthy to be "put down" like so many rabid dogs?
..... Refuse and you'll be jailed for contempt of court until to hand it over.......
Tell the judge that the laptop is just like a safe with a combination. It's too bad you don't have the combination because you forgot where you put the note that has it written down on. The combination is too tong and hard to keep in your head.. The tell him that the police is welcome to break the safe open. Of course if they can't break into the safe, it's not your fault.
How can they prove you indeed did NOT forget where the note with the combination is? After all people are often VERY forgetful, especially when under stress.
....I think that it is completely fair to ban assault rifles......
It is difficult to decide where to draw the line as to which weapons to allow and forbid. Maybe the word "bear" can give us a clue what the writers of the constitution had in mind. It's pretty hard for one person to bear, ie. carry a cannon or missile and they are also expensive and exclusively made for the military. An assault rifle is somewhat of a gray area, but I think that such a weapon is generally not thought of as a defensive weapon. Hence the name "assault". So forbidding assault weapons is likely outside of the "bear-ing" limit. A good hunting rifle, shotgun or a pistol of some sort would make a reasonable defensive weapon against criminals. A potential robber would likely go elsewhere if he knows that there is a good possibility that he could end up with a piece of lead in his brain.
.....some people to claim that the 2nd doesn't protect an individual's right to bear arms.....
It says:
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed"
Now I qualify as a people still or don't I? You probably do also. If not them why does it even use the word "people"? If it only said the militia can bear arms than that would be so, but it specifically says people. What is the singular of people? Im I one people?
Slashdot Mirror
..... to challenge a patent would as a defense once sued over said patent.....
So then all the EFF has to do is advertise far and wide that they will defend any victim of a patent troll that tries extortion based on a prior art patent that should never have been granted in the first place. If such a troll sues, the EFF comes with all its researched prior art and skilled lawyers to invalidate the patent.
......and they pay a great deal more than you would pay for the same bandwidth.........
I don't believe that even for a nanosecond. I bet that bit for bit, these big broadcasters of data pay only an infinitesimal fraction for each bit they shovel out onto the Internet, compared to what each consumer pays for each of the bits that come down their ISP connection.
The Internet inherently is NOT a broadcast medium, but a point to point communications network. It is being misused by a relatively few large broadcasters sending their signals to millions of receivers. In broadcasting, the number of receivers listening to the signal does NOT affect the cost of getting that signal to each receiver. Whatever the cost of getting the signal out to the receiver(s), it is all borne by the sender.
For the Internet, there is a cost associated with reaching each receiver. Right now, the receivers are paying the lions share of getting the data from the sending station to the receiver. It seems that the senders who wish to reach the receivers on the Internet should pay whatever the costs are, not the receivers. If the receiving of data were free or low cost, how much would the Apples and Googles of this world have to pay for shoveling their terabytes per day data onto the Internet?
.....you have everybody downloading.......
Why not charge for the bits at the SENDING end and have the receiving of the bits free or very low cost? Receiving a normal phone call or broadcast doesn't cost anything extra. If I subscribe to Cable or Satellite TV, do they charge according to how many hours the TV set is turned on and receiving bits of data? No? Why then should it cost extra to receive bits of data over the Internet?
....service provider has carefully planned things out......
That's patently false. It's just that for ordinary phone service, no new kind of content has come along that has significantly increased number of phone customers wanting to use the phone at once. If somebody invented a "magic modem" that would allow 100Mb/s dial up, they would suddenly have the same sort of problem -- namely not enough phone lines.
Most ISP's capacity was set up in the beginning for email and simple web surfing. Computer performance and cheap storage has made video possible, but the old ISP capacity has not adapted to the new applications.
To pay for this added capacity, charge the UPloaders of all this content whatever it costs. Consumers should not pay, neither should the carriers. The PROVIDERS of all this added high bandwidth content should pay for the added costs. Charge for data transmitted out onto the Internet, not data received. That's how it has always been with ordinary phones and still is.
....Young people, technophiles, nerds, sure, they download large files.....
Assuming that it costs a certain sum total to provide Internet service, the whole or most cost should be borne by the providers of the information, just like it is in the broadcast industry. Instead of charging at all for DOWNloads, charge CONSUMERS only for uploads, beyond a set limit. On the telephone, the charge is for the calls made, not for the ones received. Anyone who wants to SEND information should pay whatever the ISPs can get away with. Really big "broadcasters" such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and others could still shop around for their best providers. Consumers generally don't generate, ie. broadcast much information and should pay little or nothing to receive the information from those who do profit by generating this data. This would also reduce spam greatly, since the senders of information would pay. Any ordinary consumer with a compromised bot computer would get a fat bill for excess uploads. They would thereby have a compelling reason to clean the vermin out of their computers that caused them to get a large bill.
.....but the pressure exerted on the rock.......
I believe you are right. The pressure per se, would still steadily increase, all the way to the center, but the pressure GRADIENT would go towards zero. If there could be a hollow chamber in the center, one that could stand the pressure of the rock above it, then anything inside that chamber would not experience any net gravitational force. Is that not correct?
I came across an interesting article titled "The History of Black Holes". It gives reasons why they don't exists as a physical reality, but only as a theoretical, mathematical construct, and even then only if certain assumptions are made. If you are interested, you can get it here:
http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2006/PP-05-10.PDF
The reason why black holes have not been discovered and directly observed is simple: The are no such things. Neither is there dark matter/energy, parallel Universes, strings, worm holes and other mathematical fictions.
.....it just balances out from all directions.........
If the force is balanced in all directions, doesn't that mean that there is no net force? Is that not why we don't experience the considerable atmospheric pressure? The pressure inside and outside balances.
If the mass of each particle of rock in the center of the earth has a net force of zero on it due to the mass of the earth above it in all directions, then how can gravity act to push the particles closer to each other? How would this change as you make the sphere of matter more and more massive? If this balancing effect does NOT change as more mass is piled on, then matter in the center of a so called black hole would never be compressed dense enough to ever even form a black hole in the first place.
Maybe, the reason we have never observed a purely mathematical construct called a black hole, is simply that such things don't exist in the physical universe we live in.
I believe that science, first and foremost, must be based on observations and experiments. If then, AFTER that, these real observations can be described with words and elegant mathematics, so much the better. However, mathematical gyrations must always be backed up by observations and experiments. In the case of black holes, there is some very nice math that describes them and some of their supposed properties. Math is NOT reality, but may be and is successfully used as another language to describe reality.
Einstein came up with some mathematical concepts that made certain predictions about reality. What made these concepts valid and valuable is that they were verified by numerous careful, at times very dramatic experiments and observations. By stark contrast, black holes, dark matter/energy, strings, solar thermonuclear fusion, multiple dimensions and so many other mathematical fantasies have NOT been verified by actual scientific observations. It's fun to speculate about such fantasies, but it's not science.
......einstein started out with thought experiments.......
I was under the impression that experiments were real, not something imagined in some brain, even Einstein's brain.
Nobody has ever directly observed a back hole. Here is a different thought experiment:
Suppose it were technically possible to drill a hole clear through the Earth. If then a rock were dropped into the hole, would it not eventually come to rest, floating right in the center of the planet? Would that not mean that in the exact center there is no gravity to cause pressure on the material in the center either?
Would this canceling out of the gravity also then preclude enough pressure from happening to squeeze matter to anywhere near the density to eliminate all space between atomic constituents? Would this canceling of gravity be reversed if enough matter were piled together in one place? It seems to me, not, that in any sphere of matter of any mass, the gravitational pressure on the material in the center should always be zero. Would this not preclude the formation of a real physical object, a so called "black hole" as described in the purely mathematical constructs that postulate the real existence of such things? Of course if there are no real physical black holes, then there wouldn't be any real physical "worm holes" or any other kinds of "holes" either.
Does this canceling of pressure in the center of the sun mean that there isn't such a huge pressure there, even enough to allow atoms to fuse?
We know from real experiments and everyday experience, that heat always moves for the hotter place to the cooler place. Why is it then that we actually MEASURED that the outside of the sun, the corona is thousands of time hotter than than its surface? Why are sunspots, apparent holes in the surface of the sun, significantly cooler than the surrounding surface?
Could it be that the idea that atomic fusion with its requirement of million degree temperatures in the interior of the sun is just plain wrong? Maybe the sun is powered neither by an ancient wood campfire nor by a modern thermonuclear camp fire.
Maybe it is time to base science solely on experiments and observations, rather than fanciful math that has little if any semblance to reality as we can observe it. I think that real science, based on experiment and observation should be well separated from science fiction even if the fiction is very beautiful mathematically, or makes for intriguing and exciting movies.
.....You can't let the bad guys get their hands on the nukes......
Except in Pakistan the bad guys may get the nukes soon, if they don't already have them.
.....The body that crashed into Mercury.......
What is striking about almost all of the craters is where the material that was gouged out of the surface went. The areas outside of most craters is devoid of material, both from the impacting object, as well as from the planet. It's as if it left the planet entirely. This is true of even the smaller craters presumably made by relatively low energy events that should not have propelled the fragments fast enough for them to escape the planet's gravity.
Even at the crater in Arizona, not matter foreign to the area was ever found. In 1908, a large section of forest in Siberia was leveled by a huge explosion, thought to be caused by a massive strike from space. However, there also, no foreign matter was found so far. Could these craters on planets be formed by other mechanisms, beside the impact of a big chunk of matter?
.....So any BitTorrent client (or virtually any other P2P software) is a "server" by your definition then......
Indeed so, because the NAT router will not allow incoming access to any computer on the local network unless the router is specifically programmed to pass external requests to a particular computer on the local network. That computer in effect then becomes a server accessible any time, from the Internet for that particular service. Any _unsolicited_ external requests from the Internet that require a response from a particular computer on the internal network, behind the NAT, makes that computer a server.
.......The MPAA and RIAA overlords dont want you to have fast intertubes......
Question: Other than downloading entertainment, what would the average Joe or Jane use a super-fast Internet connection for? E-mail -- oh yeah, that much more spam? Surf the web -- works pretty well already for those who can still read.
Maybe we can go back to the mainframe days, where processing is done somewhere in centrally controlled mega-computers and the users have a simple terminal, rather than a full fledged autonomous personal computer. Whoever controls those computers then will also control all data, public and private.
Neither cell phones nor the Internet are presently as reliable as the good old-fashioned telephone service, at least where we live. We have a UPS but that doesn't do any good for Internet service when the power goes off in the area. The local amplifiers/repeaters for the DSL go off, but the phones on that same line continue to work just fine. Maybe, when the Internet becomes as reliable as the old phones, they can talk about more bandwidth. Reliability is FAR more important. I'm sure that the Egyptians can still use their phones, even though their Internet is down because of a broken cable.
What do the ordinary Japanese do with their so much faster connections? Do they really use all that bandwidth?
.....So, what exactly, defines a server?.......
How about; A computing device that accepts random, unsolicited connection from other computing devices". It's generally the kind of connection that a NAT router prevents unless especially set up to allow that. As part of the service, many ISPs supply a wireless NAT router which blocks incoming traffic from the local network.
.....it would be the execs that would trouser the money.......
Are you not forgetting the lawyers? Don't they get the lions share in most lawsuits?
....without due authority of the owner,....
Presumably, the friend would give permission to copy the CD he owns. He keeps the original and I get a copy he let me make. That is copyright infringement, but not stealing, since I had permission to copy the CD and he still has it in his collection. He has not lost anything. If there is nothing lost, how can that be stealing?
......So if I sneak into a nuclear lab and take pictures of the original blueprints for a nuclear bomb ........
If you sneak, then by definition you have no business being there in the first place. However if you were invited in and they told you could take all the pictures you like, then you would not be in trouble. So your analogy is very ill fitting. Besides, the copyright on the bomb expired and the plans for it are now public domain. Anyone with a good machine shop and the skill to use it, could build one. Getting enough fissionable material is the hard part of making a nuke.
(....However, if I make copies of an original CD and then sell those copies....)
I agree that if someone sells copies or even gives them away, that could be construed as theft, since that would be truly depriving the originator of payment for their effort.
........one less album sale that would be made........
One less album sale that COULD be made. There fixed it for you.
If I get a copy of some music from someone, it does NOT logically follow that I would have bought that album if I had not received that copy. To the contrary, If I get a song from someone and like it very much, there is a high probability I'll go buy the whole album of that performer or composer and there will be a sale, where there was none before I was introduced to that piece.
....taking copies of music/movies is still stealing........
Making a copy of something, without harming the original is not stealing. It never was. Before the printing press was invented and before recordings and photographs, literature and music thrived in every culture. To make a copy back then required almost as much labor as the original. Artists who were good, like any other skilled person were able to make a living at their art, sometimes. Most of them did it for the love of the art, making their daily bread by some other skill.
When technology of easily making copies came, the idea of copyright, artificially granted by the sovereign, came into being. At first copyright was to prevent others, for a limited time, from making a business of simply duplicating someone's creative work. As copying became easier the time was repeatedly extended as was the scope, to include non-commercial private copies.
If someone rips a CD they bought to their iPod, there is no loss to anyone and copyright is not needed. Of course the **IAA people would like to make people pay for each and every time they LISTEN to a recorded work, even though it costs nothing to listen. When someone buys *anything* the have the moral right to use it any moral fashion. There is no moral difference whether it is a hammer or a CD. The state alone now has made a LEGAL difference between the two and that is called copyright.
.....He who represents himself has a fool for a client......
I think that proverb was written by a lawyer and is therefore copyrighted.
.......just that theoretical patents should be valid in many instances.....
I have this theoretical patent of a teleportation device using mind projection. I have not made an actual working demonstration yet, because it is VERY expensive and dangerous. Anyone attempting to make it work could lose their mind. Maybe I'll build a new kind of cold fusion nuclear reactor instead.
Seriously, should anything that is simply an idea, figment of somebody's imagination get a PATENT? It seems to me that patents should be confined to ideas that actually work at the time the patent is filed. If inventors were actually required to DEMONSTRATE their ideas with a working model, rather than filing an obtuse piece of legalese paper, the number of patent applications would go down dramatically patent trolls would be out of business. Of course the way things are today, the system ensures full employment to a growing army of paper pushing, unproductive, lawyer drones specializing in IP and patents, but who know next to nothing about the invention itself they are filing about.
.....They're all part of the same theory......
They may all be part of the same theory, but the gravitational interaction and the electric interaction are VERY different. Applying the same rules, limitations and principles to them both is clearly a step of faith, not science. We don't KNOW, by actual measurement and observation, any more about gravity today than what Newton discovered a good while ago. The basic rules by which planets and spaceships move were established by him and are still used, essentially unchanged. Einstein and his theories are not used at all when calculating the path of a rocket to the Moon or Mars. Einstein developed theories, parts of which are well verified by experiment and observations. Those verified theories ALL involve the electric interaction. We are very familiar with the gravity and time, but both of these are still mostly mysterious to us as to their fundamental nature. By comparison, in the study of the nature of the electric interaction, both practically and theoretically, we are much further along.
So much effort is expended today in trying to make the data fit existing theory, rather than looking to fit the theory to the data. Cosmologists are having an ever harder time to make the what appears to be strange data fit existing theories. This is what religion does. They have a dogma which they will defend to the death, sometimes literally putting to death or persecuting people like Kepler and Copernicus and others who come up with observations that don't fit the 'accepted" data of the day. I had always thought that true scientists are above that sort of behavior, preferring to seek truth, regardless if that truth might demolish a PhD. thesis or even a whole life's work developing a theory. Maybe I'm naive about this.
......You do not qualify as a person because you are a monster......
I hope you are joking! However this redefining of what a person is as old as humanity. Slaves were considered property and killing a slave was not punished as murder. The Nazis considered Jews and others as "Untermenschen" ie. beneath human and "put down" million of them. Radical Moslem factions consider Jews and non-moslems "infidels" that can be blown to bits and bring the perpetrator of such a deed a rich reward from Allah.
Today, our society considers the unborn as mere "fetuses", unwanted tissue, instead of persons. We have killed over 40 million such persons since the SCOTUS handed down the ruling making abortion legal.
So then why not add gun owners to such a group worthy to be "put down" like so many rabid dogs?
..... Refuse and you'll be jailed for contempt of court until to hand it over.......
Tell the judge that the laptop is just like a safe with a combination. It's too bad you don't have the combination because you forgot where you put the note that has it written down on. The combination is too tong and hard to keep in your head.. The tell him that the police is welcome to break the safe open. Of course if they can't break into the safe, it's not your fault.
How can they prove you indeed did NOT forget where the note with the combination is? After all people are often VERY forgetful, especially when under stress.
....I think that it is completely fair to ban assault rifles......
It is difficult to decide where to draw the line as to which weapons to allow and forbid. Maybe the word "bear" can give us a clue what the writers of the constitution had in mind. It's pretty hard for one person to bear, ie. carry a cannon or missile and they are also expensive and exclusively made for the military. An assault rifle is somewhat of a gray area, but I think that such a weapon is generally not thought of as a defensive weapon. Hence the name "assault". So forbidding assault weapons is likely outside of the "bear-ing" limit. A good hunting rifle, shotgun or a pistol of some sort would make a reasonable defensive weapon against criminals. A potential robber would likely go elsewhere if he knows that there is a good possibility that he could end up with a piece of lead in his brain.
.....some people to claim that the 2nd doesn't protect an individual's right to bear arms.....
It says:
"the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed"
Now I qualify as a people still or don't I? You probably do also. If not them why does it even use the word "people"? If it only said the militia can bear arms than that would be so, but it specifically says people. What is the singular of people? Im I one people?