But by saying that he doesn't care if people ignore the copyright, isn't that changing the contract that he has with people who use the song
No, because if he is correct anyone who understood copyright law at that time would understand that their rights under that "contract" would end when the first 28 year copyright term was up.
Kind of like the way that the GPL changes copyright by spelling out a different agreement.
The GPL does no such thing. It's just a license agreement. The authors of the GPL'ed software have full copyright ownership of it. They are free to issue licenses to anyone they please. The fact that they choose to license full use of the software to anyone who wants it, for no fee, doesn't change the nature of the relationship. The software is copyrighted just like any other copyrighted work. This is actually an important feature of the GPL, because it's hard to hold someone liable for breaking the terms of an open license agreement, since you would have to prove that they had agreed to it to make it hold up in court. However, if someone is using GPL'ed software without having "agreed" to the license, they are in violation of the copyright on that software since they are using it without a license. Someone using GPL'ed software in a way that violates the GPL is automatically either violating a licence that they "agreed" to, or violating the copyright on the work.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think it's ever been fully tested in court.
I think you missed something. The data collected by the sysadmin don't show that the boss was working only 10% of the time. They show that less than 10% of the time he spent on the computer was for work. If his job actually doesn't require him to use the computer for anything other than the occasional email, it wouldn't be too surprising that the screen capture utility would mostly see the computer being used for non-work-related activities. Note that the utility was programmed not to take screenshots when the computer was idle.
One statistic I found interesting in the admin's explanation of the screenshots: "No screenshots (0%) documented any job-related activities such as word processing, spreadsheets, databases, job related websites, electronic document management, right-of-way plans standards, etc." Was the boss supposed to be doing these things? On the computer? It seems rather odd that his superiors wouldn't notice if he never did any of these tasks. It makes me wonder if the screenshot utility is working correctly. e.g. suppose a bug in the utility causes it to stop working whenever the electronic document management software is running. Depending on the boss' working habits, the result might well be that you only get shots of him not working.
True, but part of Google's strength has always been that they understand that the best way to get more eyeballs for their customers is to think about the needs of the owners of those eyeballs first. Not all media companies get this, surprisingly.
Does anybody know if This Land was ever published with that notice? IANAL, but a smart attorney would probably argue that that notice constitutes a non-exclusive license to use the song.
This is almost right, but the way the names of the moons were assigned was more complicated than this. The names were assigned based on the seasons, with three named full moons per season. If a season had four full moons, the extra one had no assigned name and was called a "blue" moon. This is not necessarily the second full moon in a month, however, nor was the "blue" moon necessarily the last one in the season. They had some scheme for figuring out which of the moons got which name. The modern connection with the second full moon in a month arose due to an error, as explained by the grandparent article.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm tech-savvy, but I'm an engineer not a programmer. I've done some programming in Unix and am comfortable with the command line though by no means an expert. I'm very interested in Linux and strongly hope it will succeed (I hate MS), but there is no way I'm going to install it on my desktop anytime soon. Life is short and there are always better things to do than mess around with the computer (even though I LIKE messing around with the computer). If I have to deal with a new OS (like when I buy a new system) I want it to be up and running and user-friendly as fast as possible. I need a web browser, email, word processing and games. (I'm not doing any programming these days.) Windows does the job well. AFAIK, Linux does not.
Yes, really. Americans (and Canadians) have to pay in order to not be listed in the phone book. It's called an "unlisted number", and comes at a premium price. Crazy, eh?
Actually, you misread your own references. You were thinking of 'jerry-built', which is distinct from 'jury rig', having both different origins and slightly different meaning. 'Jerry rig' however, means the same as 'jury rig', being just a corruption of it (probably inspired by the confusion with 'jerry-built'.) The grandparent post is correct that 'jury rig' is in some sense more correct than 'jerry rig'.
Bah. The KJV is public domain because it is the oldest translation to English still in common use. It is based on much inferior scholarship than more modern translations and misrepresents the meaning of scripture in many places. I don't mean that as any slight on the translators: more is known about the original languages of the Bible today than was known a few hundred years ago. Progress.
Personally, I like the New Revised Standard Version. It is very easy to understand, and great effort was made to make it true to the original texts.
No offense intended, but I felt that the point you made in those lines was not the important one. It's not that the verse is ambiguous because not all translations use the word "stillborn". In all of the translations I looked at it was clear to me that a miscarriage was what was being discussed. In all but the King James version, it seems clear that the proscribed penalty for causing a miscarriage is a fine, but that if the woman is injured as well the "eye for an eye" rule applies regarding her injuries. The ambiguity in the KJV is that (it seems to me) one could interpret it as saying that the punishment for causing the woman to miscarry is whatever revenge the husband feels is appropriate (not necessarily just a fine). This seemed to me to be a very different point from the one you were making.
There is also Exodus 21:22, wherein God commands that if a man strikes a woman and causes a child to be stillborn, it's "eye for eye, life for life."
Actually, that is not what it says. As another poster pointed out, it clearly says that the punishment for causing a miscarriage is a fine, but that if any other harm follows (presumably to the mother) it's life for life, etc.
The NRSV translation has it as:
"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye,..."
Here's the way it often works: a legitimate charity contracts a telemarking firm to collect a predetermined amount of money.
Actually, if they are doing this, you can still report them to the FTC for violating the Do-not-call list. Charities are exempt, but telemarketing companies calling on behalf of charities are not.
This has no meaning. You can't "fall" into an orbit. An orbit is falling. If you are outside the atmosphere and turn off your engines, the path of your ship is fixed. To a good approximation (neglecting the atmosphere, the moon, and the rest of the solar system), if your ship is below escape velocity it is either in an elliptical or circular orbit, or it is on an elliptical path that re-intersects the atmosphere. (There is no fundamental difference between the elliptical paths that re-intersect the atmosphere and an elliptical orbit, by the way.)
I agree. Furthermore, any reputable business is going to learn quickly that spam is "anti-advertising": it pushes customers away and lowers public opinion of the brand. It works fine if you're running a scammy mail order business nobody has ever heard of, but for a regular business spam would be likely to drive away more customers than it brings in.
Who cares? This isn't either/or. We can fix both problems at once. It would be stupid to implement a solution (e.g. the Diebold machines) that fixes one problem and creates another.
You've missed the point. Even if the machine displayed your vote on the screen to "verify" which candidate you voted for, how do you know that the vote it records on its hard drive is the same? More importantly, how do the elections officials verify that the votes they receive electronically haven't been tampered with? There is no permanent audit trail of any kind (AFAIK) with many of the new voting machines.
The nice thing with a paper ballot or vote record is that the voter can verify that their vote has been recorded correctly and we know how to secure those ballots to prevent tampering so that if there is a need for a recount it can be done.
It seems pretty obvious, but if a song is being played as a paid advertisement, it shouldn't count toward the statistics that go into determining the "charts". Duh. What next, ads for Budweiser on the Billboard top 10?
The established customer base would normally be part of the purchased corporate valuation, as the value of an established business includes it's reputation, customer base, and projected established revenues.
Those things are certainly not included in a company's assets on its books. They are definitely part of the value of the company, though. When the company is bought for a price higher than the value of the assets on its books, accountants call the excess amount "goodwill". This allows them to account for the "cost" of buying these intangible things as part of the corporate purchase.
Yes, we build things that are better at one task than anything found in nature when that task is not something that nature optimizes for. For the problems that nature does optimize for (replication, self-repair, survival under adverse conditions, etc.), nature has a tremendous head start. The issue is not complexity. Any plant is more "complex" than any machine mankind has ever made. We succeed because we make things that are simple, and focused on a narrow application.
Of course, engineers never stop when a design is "good enough".:)
Wheels are not that useful. Imagine spending every moment of the rest of your life on a Segway. And hunting for food and surviving in the wild. Wheels get stuck. Wheels lose traction. Wheels can't surmount steep obstacles like stairs and rocks. Wheels are superior on nice smooth roads. Otherwise, it's hard to beat four legs as a propulsion system.
Similarly, it's not clear to me that there are no nuclear-powered organisms because of a lack of an evolutionary path to them. Rather, it seems more likely that there is simply no viable end-state: there is no way to make an organic creature that is sufficiently well shielded to deal with an internal reactor, and/or no sufficient justification for going to that much trouble to find a power source.
I'm not sure imagining an evolutionary path to wheels is any harder than imagining one to wings. Note that you asked the wrong question though: if wheels were a viable solution, their evolutionary path would begin much earlier. They would not evolve from legs, and probably not from fins either.
As others have pointed out, there are examples in nature of both fission and fusion reactors. That is sort of beside the point, though. My concern was more with physical laws and the constraints imposed by the environment on any self-replicating nano-scale entity. Designing something capable of surviving, powering itself, finding materials needed to replicate, and carrying out replication all while dealing with adverse effects such as oxidation is not an easy job. I am not too worried about us doing it anytime soon (much less by accident). Assuming we do succeed someday, I see no reason to assume that the result would be superior to nature's solution to the same problem.
I question your statement "we don't have to evolve a complex device, we can design it from scratch" Natural organisms are far more complex than you give them credit for. The potted african violet on my shelf is a more complex machine than anything the human race has ever built.
The reason a grey goo scenario looks possible is that there is every reason to think that nanobots could do everything that bacteria do, and do it better.
Why "better"? Seriously, I question the optimism that says we can outdo a million years of evolution so easily. There are an awful lot of technical problems to be solved to make something that could even survive outside a controlled environment, much less spread.
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No, because if he is correct anyone who understood copyright law at that time would understand that their rights under that "contract" would end when the first 28 year copyright term was up.
Kind of like the way that the GPL changes copyright by spelling out a different agreement.
The GPL does no such thing. It's just a license agreement. The authors of the GPL'ed software have full copyright ownership of it. They are free to issue licenses to anyone they please. The fact that they choose to license full use of the software to anyone who wants it, for no fee, doesn't change the nature of the relationship. The software is copyrighted just like any other copyrighted work. This is actually an important feature of the GPL, because it's hard to hold someone liable for breaking the terms of an open license agreement, since you would have to prove that they had agreed to it to make it hold up in court. However, if someone is using GPL'ed software without having "agreed" to the license, they are in violation of the copyright on that software since they are using it without a license. Someone using GPL'ed software in a way that violates the GPL is automatically either violating a licence that they "agreed" to, or violating the copyright on the work.
At least, that's the theory. I don't think it's ever been fully tested in court.
One statistic I found interesting in the admin's explanation of the screenshots: "No screenshots (0%) documented any job-related activities such as word processing, spreadsheets, databases, job related websites, electronic document management, right-of-way plans standards, etc." Was the boss supposed to be doing these things? On the computer? It seems rather odd that his superiors wouldn't notice if he never did any of these tasks. It makes me wonder if the screenshot utility is working correctly. e.g. suppose a bug in the utility causes it to stop working whenever the electronic document management software is running. Depending on the boss' working habits, the result might well be that you only get shots of him not working.
True, but part of Google's strength has always been that they understand that the best way to get more eyeballs for their customers is to think about the needs of the owners of those eyeballs first. Not all media companies get this, surprisingly.
Does anybody know if This Land was ever published with that notice? IANAL, but a smart attorney would probably argue that that notice constitutes a non-exclusive license to use the song.
This is almost right, but the way the names of the moons were assigned was more complicated than this. The names were assigned based on the seasons, with three named full moons per season. If a season had four full moons, the extra one had no assigned name and was called a "blue" moon. This is not necessarily the second full moon in a month, however, nor was the "blue" moon necessarily the last one in the season. They had some scheme for figuring out which of the moons got which name. The modern connection with the second full moon in a month arose due to an error, as explained by the grandparent article.
Sky and Telescope has published an article more recently, explaining what happened and their role in it. It is available online.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I'm tech-savvy, but I'm an engineer not a programmer. I've done some programming in Unix and am comfortable with the command line though by no means an expert. I'm very interested in Linux and strongly hope it will succeed (I hate MS), but there is no way I'm going to install it on my desktop anytime soon. Life is short and there are always better things to do than mess around with the computer (even though I LIKE messing around with the computer). If I have to deal with a new OS (like when I buy a new system) I want it to be up and running and user-friendly as fast as possible. I need a web browser, email, word processing and games. (I'm not doing any programming these days.) Windows does the job well. AFAIK, Linux does not.
It is not true that all providers allow free reception of SMS messages. It depends entirely on which provider you have, and which plan.
It seems to me, that the best way to win would be to just close your eyes and ignore the ball. Better yet, take a nap.
Yes, really. Americans (and Canadians) have to pay in order to not be listed in the phone book. It's called an "unlisted number", and comes at a premium price. Crazy, eh?
Actually, you misread your own references. You were thinking of 'jerry-built', which is distinct from 'jury rig', having both different origins and slightly different meaning. 'Jerry rig' however, means the same as 'jury rig', being just a corruption of it (probably inspired by the confusion with 'jerry-built'.) The grandparent post is correct that 'jury rig' is in some sense more correct than 'jerry rig'.
Personally, I like the New Revised Standard Version. It is very easy to understand, and great effort was made to make it true to the original texts.
No offense intended, but I felt that the point you made in those lines was not the important one. It's not that the verse is ambiguous because not all translations use the word "stillborn". In all of the translations I looked at it was clear to me that a miscarriage was what was being discussed. In all but the King James version, it seems clear that the proscribed penalty for causing a miscarriage is a fine, but that if the woman is injured as well the "eye for an eye" rule applies regarding her injuries. The ambiguity in the KJV is that (it seems to me) one could interpret it as saying that the punishment for causing the woman to miscarry is whatever revenge the husband feels is appropriate (not necessarily just a fine). This seemed to me to be a very different point from the one you were making.
Actually, that is not what it says. As another poster pointed out, it clearly says that the punishment for causing a miscarriage is a fine, but that if any other harm follows (presumably to the mother) it's life for life, etc.
The NRSV translation has it as:
"When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman's husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine. If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, ..."
Actually, if they are doing this, you can still report them to the FTC for violating the Do-not-call list. Charities are exempt, but telemarketing companies calling on behalf of charities are not.
This has no meaning. You can't "fall" into an orbit. An orbit is falling. If you are outside the atmosphere and turn off your engines, the path of your ship is fixed. To a good approximation (neglecting the atmosphere, the moon, and the rest of the solar system), if your ship is below escape velocity it is either in an elliptical or circular orbit, or it is on an elliptical path that re-intersects the atmosphere. (There is no fundamental difference between the elliptical paths that re-intersect the atmosphere and an elliptical orbit, by the way.)
I agree. Furthermore, any reputable business is going to learn quickly that spam is "anti-advertising": it pushes customers away and lowers public opinion of the brand. It works fine if you're running a scammy mail order business nobody has ever heard of, but for a regular business spam would be likely to drive away more customers than it brings in.
Who cares? This isn't either/or. We can fix both problems at once. It would be stupid to implement a solution (e.g. the Diebold machines) that fixes one problem and creates another.
The nice thing with a paper ballot or vote record is that the voter can verify that their vote has been recorded correctly and we know how to secure those ballots to prevent tampering so that if there is a need for a recount it can be done.
It seems pretty obvious, but if a song is being played as a paid advertisement, it shouldn't count toward the statistics that go into determining the "charts". Duh. What next, ads for Budweiser on the Billboard top 10?
Those things are certainly not included in a company's assets on its books. They are definitely part of the value of the company, though. When the company is bought for a price higher than the value of the assets on its books, accountants call the excess amount "goodwill". This allows them to account for the "cost" of buying these intangible things as part of the corporate purchase.
Yes, we build things that are better at one task than anything found in nature when that task is not something that nature optimizes for. For the problems that nature does optimize for (replication, self-repair, survival under adverse conditions, etc.), nature has a tremendous head start. The issue is not complexity. Any plant is more "complex" than any machine mankind has ever made. We succeed because we make things that are simple, and focused on a narrow application.
Wheels are not that useful. Imagine spending every moment of the rest of your life on a Segway. And hunting for food and surviving in the wild. Wheels get stuck. Wheels lose traction. Wheels can't surmount steep obstacles like stairs and rocks. Wheels are superior on nice smooth roads. Otherwise, it's hard to beat four legs as a propulsion system.
Similarly, it's not clear to me that there are no nuclear-powered organisms because of a lack of an evolutionary path to them. Rather, it seems more likely that there is simply no viable end-state: there is no way to make an organic creature that is sufficiently well shielded to deal with an internal reactor, and/or no sufficient justification for going to that much trouble to find a power source.
I'm not sure imagining an evolutionary path to wheels is any harder than imagining one to wings. Note that you asked the wrong question though: if wheels were a viable solution, their evolutionary path would begin much earlier. They would not evolve from legs, and probably not from fins either.
I question your statement "we don't have to evolve a complex device, we can design it from scratch" Natural organisms are far more complex than you give them credit for. The potted african violet on my shelf is a more complex machine than anything the human race has ever built.
Why "better"? Seriously, I question the optimism that says we can outdo a million years of evolution so easily. There are an awful lot of technical problems to be solved to make something that could even survive outside a controlled environment, much less spread.